[HN Gopher] London's Oyster card: Are its days numbered?
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London's Oyster card: Are its days numbered?
Author : edward
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-09-10 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| [deleted]
| saos wrote:
| > Back then, your bus might have been bendy and cost between 70p
| and PS1 to board.
|
| Oh I remember. Now it's PS1.55 and rising. Public transport in
| the UK is now becoming luxury
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| London is pretty amazing for public transport as well by
| British standards. I took up cycling when the office moved
| because my new bus route was just under PS6 to go about six
| miles, which took an hour each way according to the timetable
| but in reality the first bus would be 30-40 minutes late in the
| morning if it bothered to turn up at all, and it only came
| every hour and a half.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| It's still crazy expensive. An annual ticket for zone 1-5
| costs 2500 pounds. For that price you get two annual adult
| tickets for all of public transport in Austria or 80% of a
| ticket for all of Switzerland.
| zahllos wrote:
| I agree, having lived in both the UK and Switzerland. If
| you can justify the cost, the GA in Switzerland is
| incredible and works for most trains, buses and boats in
| the country (the exceptions are usually private touristy
| rail routes that go up mountains). People can and do
| commute from Geneva to Zurich in a day and have mobile data
| the whole way.
|
| Outside of London, UK public transport varies greatly in
| quality and all of it is very expensive and overpriced. UK
| season tickets for lines outside of London typically
| involve a fixed route on one operator and usually only
| support commuting: one there and back journey 5 days per
| week max. By contrast, the GA in Switzerland really is
| unlimited. It will work equally well for boats crossing the
| lake in Geneva as it will for the local trams in Zurich and
| the train to get you between them, even if you travel on a
| Sunday. It doesn't matter if you present it to cantonal
| transport people, or private train operators, it will work,
| no arguments. Pretty much the only people not part of the
| GA scheme are tourist train routes up mountains, and to be
| honest, that's fair enough - staff to the facilities on the
| top likely get a free ride up anyway and nobody else needs
| to commute to the top of the Jungfrau.
| vinay427 wrote:
| I agree; that's insanely expensive especially given the
| cost of living in other aspects compared to Switzerland.
|
| To add, this GA/AG pass in Switzerland includes essentially
| all travel except for a few funiculars, gondolas, and other
| specialized modes for leisure purposes. That means
| virtually every train in the country with the densest
| railway network outside of city-states as well as local
| transit (buses, local trains, ferries, etc.) is included.
|
| Granted, Switzerland isn't a large country, but its public
| transit coverage is overrepresented, making it seem like a
| far better deal than this annual London zone pass.
| edwardwatson wrote:
| Counterintuitively, it's even worse out of London where
| salaries are lower. In Nottingham, a 15 minute bus ride to work
| costs me PS3 (so I cycle).
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The inflation calculator of the BoE says that the average
| inflation between 2003 and 2020 was 2.9% per year, which means
| that PS1 in 2003 was PS1.62 in 2020. So the price you mention
| is not bad.
| asdff wrote:
| I'm surprised fares are even increasing. No taxes to support
| transit? In LA County only like 5% of revenue came from the
| farebox so they are making buses and trains free for students
| and low income people. The rest comes from sales taxes within
| the county and federal and state funding.
| basisword wrote:
| You can see how they're funded on their website[0]. I don't
| think the city has the power to tax locally in the way LA
| might and funding London public transport out of general tax
| money would never go down well politically.
|
| [0] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/investors/funding-sources
| asdff wrote:
| The county didn't have the power either to do it
| themselves, it ended up being the voters who approved the
| additional sales tax (iirc another 1%) at the ballot box.
| We are probably comparing apples and oranges though, too
| many differences in government.
| tialaramex wrote:
| _But_ it 's PS1.55 for up to an hour of new bus journeys in the
| system. So this means you can reasonably take two (or more)
| buses if that's a sensible way to make your journey rather than
| considering that each is priced separately so you should try to
| choose only the single longest bus journey for your trip.
|
| You can do this with the tube, although it's less often
| necessary, e.g. suppose you're at Barbican and you live in
| Amersham. It _might_ happen that your tube from Barbican turns
| into a Fast to Amersham and that 's actually a reasonable way
| to get home. But much more likely you should disembark at Baker
| Street, leave the station, walk a few minutes to Marylebone,
| tap back in and _board a mainline train_ to Amersham, since
| that 's actually the same exact system and counts as a single
| Oyster journey between Barbican and Amersham.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| One hour or five minutes, it doesn't matter, because either
| way, for commuters it's 2x1.55gbp, or twice as much as
| before. If the average paycheck hasn't gone up by that much
| in this time, it's more expensive for the user.
| martimarkov wrote:
| Please calculate it with the inflation and revisit your
| statement.
| als0 wrote:
| Last time I checked...average salaries have not kept up
| with inflation. So I think their point is still valid
| even if you account for inflation.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| My company did some work with TfL when Oystercards were being
| rolled out. A very clever bloke at work was tasked with working
| out an algorithm that would retrospectively minimise a
| passenger's spend based on their journey history - so e.g. If
| they'd done 9 single journeys in a week it might decide they'd
| have been better off buying a weekly pass, and adjust their
| balance accordingly. You have monthly and even annual passes to
| factor in as well of course.
|
| He spent about 20 minutes one lunchtime trying to explain it to
| me, but it went straight over my head (I think 'alpha-beta
| pruning' was in there somewhere), but anyway it was all for
| naught as - hardly surprisingly - TfL had little appetite for
| software that would actually reduce their revenue.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| It wasn't all for naught. That's how oyster (and now
| contactless payments) work
| pertymcpert wrote:
| I don't understand how they could implement the savings /
| spending caps for contactless cards but couldn't do it at the
| same time for Oyster cards. It's insanity.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| The fun was for calculating the bonus payment on the Denmark
| transit system, I don't know how many man-years was saved once
| it was automatized.
| leonk wrote:
| That's what contactless cards do now, there's a PAYG cap. When
| you read about it doesn't really sound that complex (not sure
| if it needed a clever bloke with an algorithm, but then what do
| I know?)
|
| I guess because they couldn't work out a way for you to
| purchase a travel card on your contactless card, so this was
| the only way to allow regular commuters to use their
| contactless.
|
| Anyway it was the reason I switched over from oyster to
| contactless. I realised I was getting ripped off as I would
| always use PAYG and _sometimes_ went over the caps.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Last time I used digikey, they would notify me that if I bought
| a few more widgets I'd be eligible for bulk pricing, which
| would lower my bill. Sure, they would move more widgets, but
| would receive less money. I was a little shocked and impressed.
| I did buy more widgets, and did indeed lower my bill.
| gsnedders wrote:
| While I think it's clear that some of the currently Oyster-only
| features could be migrated (e.g., you can have a rail discount
| card on an Oyster card, but clearly it merely requires a way to
| link an Oyster card to the "account" of the contactless card),
| others are more challenging, like free travel passes.
|
| I suppose you could just issue EMV-compatible cards where you
| grant the holder free travel, though I'd expect this would be
| more complicated than the status-quo (both in terms of needing to
| register IDs in lists that aren't particularly long currently,
| and in terms of needing a much larger standard implemented).
| nhf wrote:
| This is essentially what the new fare card in Philadelphia is.
| It's implemented as a prepaid MasterCard that can also hold
| transit specific passes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key
| djhworld wrote:
| I lived in London for about 10 years and used the Oyster almost
| exclusively (with auto-topup enabled)
|
| The biggest advantage I found was the latency between you tapping
| the card on the reader and the acknowledgement "beep" to let you
| through. Always seemed extremely responsive to the point where
| you get used to the motion of going through the barriers with one
| fell swoop.
|
| When using anything else (e.g. credit cards/Apple Pay/whatever)
| the difference always seemed jarring, like maybe an extra
| 200ms-300ms longer for the thing to light green.
|
| It might have gotten better since I was there though.
| basisword wrote:
| I use the "Express Travel Card" feature with Apple Pay now and
| it's as fast as oyster was (in the wallet settings). I walk up
| to the gate with my phone in hand, locked, hold it over the
| reader and it's super fast. I remember the slightly delay in
| the early days (plus verifying your ID with touch/face in
| advance of the gate) but I think it's a solved issue now.
| david_allison wrote:
| I can't find a source, but I recall reading that the staff
| oyster cards were significantly faster than the oyster cards
| provided to the public (~100ms rings a bell).
|
| I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
| xxpor wrote:
| No need to check for topups/updating a db potentially?
| julianlam wrote:
| Do you know why Oyster cards are so seamless?
|
| Presto in Canada is built on similar technology, but no
| existing implementations were used because it's more expensive
| that way (thanks capitalism!)
|
| For us, the tap takes half a second. If a queue forms, you'll
| be waiting awhile. It takes 2-3s if your card is in a purse,
| too.
|
| Purse notwithstanding, it probably takes that long because the
| balance is not stored on the card. A round-trip to an external
| server is required.
|
| Worse yet, if you try to use a freshly loaded Presto card on a
| terminal that is not internet-enabled (read: city buses), you
| cannot, because the offline terminal is only synced once a day.
| Don't even get me started...
| cbhl wrote:
| IIRC Japan's FeliCa (Suica, PASMO, etc.) is much faster
| because it had more stringent timing requirements in the spec
| because of how many people they needed to be able to walk
| through a turnstile, which increases the cost of the
| associated hardware (the readers in the
| turnstiles/trains/buses, as well as in e.g. iPhone chips).
|
| IIRC Presto _does_ store the value on the card -- when you
| load value online, every bus /train/turnstile gets a batch
| data file of cards it needs to update the balance for, and
| checks every card that passes through it to see if yours is
| one of them, and then writes the updated balance to the card.
| But the slower scans are due to the choice of a different
| standardized transit pass format (one that allows for much
| slower -- IIRC, hundreds of ms -- reads/writes than the
| Japanese standard).
| julianlam wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation! I didn't know Presto stored
| that kind of data on the card and assumed otherwise given
| the lag time.
|
| I stand corrected!
| tempest_ wrote:
| This is incorrect.
|
| The balance is stored on the card, in fact the balance being
| stored on the card is something that people complain about
| constantly because there is a 24 hour period where the buses
| need to return to the depot to update and people hate that.
| milderworkacc wrote:
| Prepaid single purpose cards like Oyster (and Opal and Myki in
| Sydney and Melbourne which I'm more familiar with) have a huge
| advantage in not being linked to your legal name and address in
| the way your credit card is. Removing that option links every
| trip on public transport to a legal identity overnight.
|
| We only have these cards due to historical quirk (quick
| contactless technology existed, but not in credit cards), and if
| we lose them, it's another thing that we're never getting back.
|
| (I protested the removal of paper tickets from Sydney's trains
| and busses, for what it's worth...)
| spoonjim wrote:
| With credit card payment, facial recognition, cell phone GPS
| tracking, etc. I think they can connect you to the trip even if
| you used Oyster. And if they're taking photographs of the
| currency that ATM machines are spitting out (easily possible)
| there's nothing to suggest that they can't track cash
| transactions as well.
| bserge wrote:
| With enough effort, anything is possible. When it comes to
| hiding from authorities (or anyone, really), it's only a
| matter of putting up more roadblocks than they're willing to
| overcome.
|
| They're human, too. Often dumb, most often uninterested and
| lazy. And everyone gives up at some point.
| milderworkacc wrote:
| My thinking has always been that yes, targeted surveillance
| of a target in public is easy, but is it "every trip in a
| searchable database" easy? Facial recognition is the one here
| that actually does make it that easy, hence my strong
| opposition to it!
| bserge wrote:
| Will my old identity building knowhow be useful in this brave
| new world? Only one way to find out!
| usrnm wrote:
| If you paid for it with your credit card, then it certainly is
| linked to your name. And not a lot of people use cash these
| days
| ace2358 wrote:
| The purchase of credit can be linked for sure. But at least
| my trips can't be tracked. I can say, use anyone's travel
| card. Anyone can top up my card. I can top up with cash.
| Whatever. Each individual trip can't be tied to a person.
|
| We don't want to lose this privacy because as mentioned.
| We'll never get it back.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It's still nice for people who may not have (local) bank
| accounts, namely poor people and tourists.
|
| IIRC you can't have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese
| bank account.
| defaulty wrote:
| > This has led to a growing colony of Oyster cards that haven't
| been used for at least a year - about 82m of them - and
| passengers' cash in the coffers of Transport for London (TfL)
| totalling more than PS550m.
|
| I would assume that TfL is investing that static PS550m. Even at
| a 1% gain annually, that's a nice chunk of profit from sitting on
| Oyster cash
| zzandd wrote:
| The pandemic could explain this, a lot of people are now
| reluctant to use public transport at all.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I guess that's never money that they need to pay out to anyone,
| so there's no difference if someone "uses" the money on the
| Oyster or not
| csnover wrote:
| I don't know how many people know this, but the balances on
| Oyster cards are refundable[0], so it is possible that they
| would indeed need to pay it out.
|
| [0] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-
| pay...
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Despite the local critisicms, the tech implementation at TFL is
| really good. Oystercard was early, it's the same tech as all of
| public transport in the Netherlands (which started later but
| covers the whole country), but TFL quickly implemented support
| for all contactless bank cards while the Netherlands still in
| 2021 doesn't have that.
|
| When I was living in the UK I only had an oystercard to lend it
| to friends and family visiting. Used Apple pay or my creditcard
| for all of my own travel.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| NL tech was outdated before it was even released.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Can you expand on this?
|
| I'm far from an expert, but the OV-chipkaart was implemented
| 15 years ago. At the time 3G connectivity on buses and trams
| couldn't always be guaranteed, and the tech in the readers
| was also limited. To me it seems that executing all
| transactions on the card itself and balancing the books later
| makes sense given these limitations.
|
| (That's not to say I don't have any criticisms on the system
| - I think the entire 'omchecken' procedure when switching
| between train companies could have been avoided and doesn't
| benefit passengers at all, and the system also doesn't allow
| for a fare cap at the day/week/month ticket level like
| Oyster.)
| vanviegen wrote:
| I think GP is referring to the fact that the system used
| (uses?) NFC chips with very weak encryption, even for the
| time. https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/ov-chip-card/
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| That was certainly a mistake, but those were replaced by
| cards with more secure chips in 2011 [1] - I think it's
| hardly fair to write off the entire system as 'outdated
| at launch' because of one (admittedly high-profile)
| security flaw.
|
| [1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-
| ov-chipka...
| starky wrote:
| I disagree, here in Vancouver our system is also from Cubic and
| it is terrible. Our transit corporation, Translink, had to
| switch all the buses to a single zone fare because they
| couldn't get the system to work over the cellular network. Not
| to mention that the cost to run the system every year is more
| than the total fare evasion on the entire system before it was
| implemented. So revenue is lower on that part of the system and
| they aren't saving any money. At rapid transit stations, the
| fare gates are not reliable and extremely slow.
|
| It is shocking how much better the much older MTR system is in
| Hong Kong in comparison.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| They'll have to have something for kids and anyone who can't/wont
| get a card (tourists from non rfid countries, people with
| horrendous credit or fraud in their history, weird religious
| sorts etc).
| bserge wrote:
| I lived in Birmingham for a few years and loved the ticket apps.
|
| Just buy a few tickets (so you can replicate the font),
| screenshot the whole thing and edit them with a new date and
| maybe a different number and you can travel for free, controller
| approved!
|
| At least I never got a QR code scanned, they just looked at the
| screen and moved on. Love you all!
| Veen wrote:
| My local bus ticket app has a rolling ball and other animations
| to prevent that sort of ticket forgery.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| With ubiquitous contactless payments there is no longer really a
| use for Oyster cards for pay-as-you-go journeys.
|
| I think it's really only useful for season tickets now, which is
| probably significant so I don't think they'll disappear any time
| soon.
| basisword wrote:
| There's one really good use - student discounts.
|
| It's been a few years so my figures are likely a bit off but
| you can get a student Oyster card (which gets you something
| like 30% off all journeys) and then you can link it with your
| 18-25 rail card and get a further 30% off the tube during off
| peak times. It all adds up to a huge saving.
| andylynch wrote:
| Student discounts is a big one, school kids pensioners and
| veterans can travel free.
|
| Tourism is another; foreign cards can often work but it depends
| on the issuing bank and is subject to their sometimes
| extortionate foreign transaction fees.
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