This wasn’t super obvious to me until later in the article but this is about the single use tickets.
Neat stuff, though I can’t say I love the concept of e-waste NFC.
Neat stuff, though I can’t say I love the concept of e-waste NFC.
The other factor is that people who use tickets regularly would use the rechargeable plastic cards, rather than the disposable tickets, so the amount of waste is reduced.
It does add significant costs to the transport system. Single-use NFC cards must cost at least a few cents to produce and dispense, which adds up when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of rides every day.
Even reusable NFC cards are costly in terms of providing all the infrastructure to support them: software, servers, enough top-up machines in stations to handle peak demand, commissions to retailers selling the cards, extra staff to deal with customer support, delays and congestion caused by top-up/ticketing queues, etc.
That’s one reason London’s TfL has been pushing everyone to just use their bank-issued contactless credit/debit cards (or NFC-enabled phones) for years now.
It’s also more convenient, of course, to never have to worry about your balance or recharging the card.
Unfortunately the days where you could ride the buses for free around the whole Heathrow area are gone, however.
Many transit agencies do explicitly incentivize reuse, e.g. by offering cheaper fares using a reloadable contactless card and often charging a deposit for that card.
Even then, many of these systems have been struggling due to the IC shortage, given the low margins these single-use tickets have to operate on. In some Asian countries, including Japan and Malaysia, it was tricky to get a new transit card for several months or even years, even though there is a deposit charge.
A ticket needs to be printed anyways, the single use ticket with chip does not come from thin air.
The NFC doesn't need to be printed. It just needs to be dispensed.
My city went from printed paper tickets, that didn't even need to be scanned, to contactless fare system with paper NFC tickets. It saves money having simpler and less used ticket machines. It helps that most people use contactless credit card or fare card. They really should have more signs that can tap phone or credit card cause I suspect tourists think they need to buy ticket.
Magstripes tend to work not so well when you have the ticket in your pocket for a couple days, printed codes involve people futzing with cameras. You can use a sort of card ingestion system to line up a QR code or the like... but those things are complicated and break down a lot! You end up needing staff to constantly be opening it and unclogging it. This works alright if you have like 6 turnstiles, less so when you have 2 or 3.
Obviously you can work with those models anyways, and plenty of transportation networks do! But if your rush hour involves moving a million+ people, you really do need this stuff to go fast.
How very true... SWIPE CARD AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE in glowing turqouise-ish dot matrix letters will be forever etched into my brain long after the Metrocard is finally gone.
Personally I collect the cards instead because I have a tendency to revisit cities years into the future. I just wish cities wouldn't make their cards expire so damn quickly. Wuhan's metro is nice, the cards don't expire until 10 years later. But I've found Singapore and Taipei expire within 3 years and you lose your stored money.
I have this "brick" of public transit cards for about 20 cities. It feels powerful. I kind of wish I could just swipe this brick in any city and just go. Unfortunately they all interfere with each other.
I’d bet a lot of them are sold at the airport: the fare to downtown comes with a 24-hr pass for other buses and metros.
Just let me pay with coins, or a credit card in seconds, with no return work.
My guess is this might be because on-the-fly credit card authorizations still take too long. Waiting 3 seconds for an EMV contactless verification would seriously hold up the line at rush hour in a country where most people live by public transit.
If I were to guess, the registration is probably what enables them to pre-authorize a credit line and allow you to tap in in a fraction of a second.
Are you sure that's true? Their website says otherwise:
> Do I need to sign up for a SimplyGo account to use my contactless bank card for transit? You do not need to sign up for a SimplyGo account to use your contactless bank card for transit.
Did this change recently? I travelled a little over a year ago and my Wise card worked right after I landed at the Singapore airport.
I have no issue with temp cards, if I can buy them right at the pickup location. I once flew into a place late at night, and only stores had cards to buy, and all were closed.
Duh.
The vending machines at every station should be capable of directly vending public transit cards. I think most of the better systems around the world do work that way.
London has been using contactless for a while.
IC fabrication produces a lot of chemical waste, and I would imagine that these ICs aren't fabbed in a place that has a great track record on pollution.
I'm not saying there is none, just trying get an idea of how much of a problem this really is. We also need to consider what impact any alternative solution would have.
What struck me from the description of the system was that it seems that no electronics is really needed at all, a unique QR or barcode would be just as good because the back end system records the use.
But that would require the installation of optical readers in a system that might not have them but does already have NFC readers. Adding those readers would add a considerable amount of e-waste too.
Part of the “software eating the world” story is the decreased cost of precision that enabled the hardware substrate of software to be inexpensively and ubiquitously included in any mass produced object.
In Portugal, you pay extra for the initial ticket, but subsequent uses are cheaper, because you are using the same physical ticket.
Some people live on a different continents and their environment looks completely different. This is giving me same vibes as those ‘probe you are not a robot’ tests that ask you to identify things that are specific to USA’
Ticket in english sometimes refers to a season or monthly ticket, so it’s pretty ambiguous.