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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

I am apalled at the crazy amount of waste this creates. Millions of tickets with chips inside them?

My understanding is that they are one time use?

In New Delhi metro, India, they used to use plastic tokens with these chips, but at the end of the journey, to exit the station you have to give the chip back.

Nowadays, they use a printed QR system, and they have even gone paperless. I can buy the ticket with my mobile app, pay using UPI instant payment, and show the qr code on the phone to the scanner and then travel.

For monthly card holders, rfid chip based cards are issued.

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The fact that they cost just a few pennies each is a reflection of how little waste is occurring. If waste bothers you, focus on something worthwhile like canceling just one airline flight.

Lifetime of a plastic opus card may even be more wasteful, by mass of plastic and chip, if not used extensively. For example, one time use is often for tourists, where a full chip opus would be very wasteful indeed.

> If waste bothers you, focus on something worthwhile like canceling just one airline flight.

That's just whataboutism: If there's an alternative way of solving the same problem that generates less waste, why not use it?

I find the contactless coin form factor for single rides quite clever personally, and I don't see any downsides compared to paper single-use tickets (other than that validators and gates need some storage container to collect them, which could be tricky in buses).

Just because you don't see downsides doesn't mean there aren't any. Coins are lost or broken or intentionally damaged, and may need cleaning and staff to handle and transport them. It's not zero waste. In fact I suspect the STM solution may overall have less waste. If you read the article, the chip is the size of a grain of salt.

Airline is not just whataboutism. It illustrates the absurdity of scale in your point. Imagine someone who is spending 20 minutes to save themselves 4 pennies on their electrical bill, but they are running 8 air conditioners with their windows open during a heatwave. Yes, that's whataboutism, but it's an informal fallacy, meaning I may still have a good point.

> I suspect the STM solution may overall have less waste. If you read the article, the chip is the size of a grain of salt.

The antenna isn't, however. In any case, I think there's a pretty high chance these tickets will not end up in a dedicated recycling facility that can properly separate antenna from paper and recycle both, disregarding the chip.

For similar reasons, Japan is phasing out even magnetic stripe single-ride tickets out of recycling concerns (in favor of QR code based ones).

> Imagine someone who is spending 20 minutes to save themselves 4 pennies on their electrical bill

That's not an appropriate comparison, though. Buying a reusable token doesn't take 20 minutes more than buying a paper ticket.

Imagine instead a device manufacturer spending some months of R&D to help every single household in a large country save 4 pennies on their electrical bills, and it doesn't seem so absurd anymore.

> Buying a reusable token doesn't take 20 minutes more than buying a paper ticket.

No, but it could expend 20x the resources, and not be used 20x as much.

As the article mentions, the purpose of these paper tickets is for single-use or short term use, and the system also supports plastic cards for longer term use.

These tokens are collected at the end of each trip (or you can’t leave). This obviously only works in systems that have mandatory exit turnstiles.

I find the plastic tokens quite clever, but QR codes are not a great option for mobile ticketing at transit gates: Often it takes people forever to pull up the code in the right orientation and dial up the brightness enough for the scan to work. Not something I love to deal with when I want to catch a train.

QR code reading does not depend on the orientation, at-least as per its spec. there are many apps and devices out there that can read a QR code in any orientation.

In the app that is used by me, the brightness of the screen is automatically increased by the app as soon as I open the ticket QR, and then reduces to its previous state, once the QR code display is removed.

Not any orientation – if you present a QR code ticket the wrong way around, or even just angled away from the plane the reader focuses on too much, it doesn't work.

Contactless tickets work both ways, and in addition to that usually have a larger, more forgiving "landing area". On top of that, they can usually read through a wallet (but that's more relevant to regular commuters, arguably; tourists and infrequent riders will likely have purchased the ticket just moments before using it).

If the QR code is in an app of some kind, any one I've seen maxes out the brightness while it's onscreen. Orientation data is built into QR codes anyway, so that's a problem with the reader.

You should read footnote #2. You can get an Opus card, which is reloadable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_card

I couldn't find any data on usage for one vs. the other, hopefully it's not a crazy amount. I'd imagine that most people who use transit on a regular basis do not use single-use tickets.

The chips are slightly smaller than a grain of salt. Doesn't seem like the craziest amount of waste.

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