> For various reasons, the contactless system sadly still lags behind Oyster, with basic functionality like NR discount entitlements missing and showing no signs of emerging anytime soon.
It’ll happen eventually. The Oyster system has already hit breaking point. There’s now a number of stations around London that only accept contactless and not Oyster, due to memory constrains on the Oyster cards that prevents support.
TfL’s long term goal is to migrate the entire Oyster system onto the contactless backed end, so the cards cease to be stored value cards, and simply become unique account identifiers. TfL have did part of this migration a few years ago when they phased out older Oyster cards that couldn’t correct support the new ID based system. I assume that when they introduced weekly caps on the Oyster cards, that was partly enabled by their migration efforts to the contactless backed end.
For them to complete the migration, they’ll need to support railcards on the contactless system. Although exactly how they’ll do that I have no idea. But either way the capabilities of the two different systems continue to diverge, and that’s going rapidly become unsustainable.
> The physical infrastructure, like the gatelines, are all still controlled by Cubic as well.
Sure, but so what? I don’t think TfL should be getting into the game of building and running their own barriers, there’s no point. It would be like expecting TfL to build and run all their own trains. They’re much better of contracting that work out to other companies that specialise in that work.
The only reason why TfL built its own contactless system was because there was simply no commercial offering out there that met their needs. Ticketing is probably one of TfLs most important skills, and part of building the contactless system involved negotiating with Mastercard and Visa to introduce specific new features into all card systems and contracts to support transport ticketing. Something which every other transport system in the world that also support contactless payments has directly benefited from.