71 replies
9h24m
To peoples asking: "Why not just QR codes?" Again it's all about latency. QR codes take longer when you tap them at the gate: opening the app, waiting for the scanner to adjust, connecting to inet. While NFC handle these tasks almost instantly. A big difference in super busy places where queues are a nightmare.
Again, this problem wouldn't exist if we can optimize WFH methods. We don't need to solving "physical problems" from start to finish. Making, distributing, and recycling all those ticket papers.
No matter how advanced your transportation tech is, moving people long distances is still really costly. Sorry to "steer" this conversation into WFH and WFO topics.
In some places, like Oslo's metro, tram & bus systems, the solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're trusted to have bought a ticket for your journey. There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance.
I was watching a travel show about France and in Paris it seems tourists can get confused as to where their ticket is for. They can easily end up on a train in an area their ticket isn't for. You get a 100 Euro fine! And that's an honest mistake not trying to get away without buying a ticket.
100 Euros for a travel story you'll tell years into the future, and funding the tourism economy - win-win!
100 Euros per person. A group of 7 would be 700 and that is only one mishap, there could be multiple per day..
yet another reason not to visit Paris, win-win!
Pretty sure you wouldn't want to make two of those in succession. I mean, last time I had to pay a fine for not having The Correct Blessed Type Of Ticket, I did pay a lot of attention to the tickets I bought next. (Wasn't as expensive as in Paris, but still a palpable mistake.)
"We got fined for getting off the train at the wrong stop" is not much of a travel story though.
I was on a plane recently and two people in the row behind me were having a lengthy moan about their respective travel experiences / disasters. They stopped escalating when one of them said "That's nothing, we were just coming in to land when the volcano started to erupt."
I was really tempted to stand up and pitch in with a line about landing in Tokyo when Godzilla chose that precise moment to attack, but the fasten-seatbelts sign had just lit up, so I didn't.
Yeah, that kinda sucks.
Last year I bought a friend a ticket from Avon (just south of Paris) to Charles de Gaulle. I rode along and we stopped for lunch in Paris.
He carried on to the airport, met mr. Ticket man, and got a €100 fine for taking the route printed on his ticket, but too slowly.
I can’t understand what they’re trying to incentivise by doing this to tourists.
Transport company gets some money and ticket man gets a share. There is no incentive for them to be human.
Like a lot of rules, enforcement needs to be realistic, appropriate and not overly harsh. In Oslo at least, the obvious tourists tend to get let off with just buying a ticket, even though the ticket app makes it easy to buy the correct ticket. If you speak Norwegian they often look at your travel history to see if you’re a regular payer who just forgot.
Most North American cities sadly don’t operate at the level of trust required for a system like that to work, as much as I agree it would be better for everyone.
Many cities in North America do. The key is the fine for not having a ticket is high enough that you are on average much better off having a ticket. Generally this works out to enough random inspections that the average person is checked once a month, and the fine for not having a ticket works out to the cost of a 3 month pass. The exact numbers are of course subject to debate, but the above should give any city a good starting place they can play with.
IMHO, if you have fare gates they need to be tied into a parent control system so that parents to limit where their kids are allowed to go alone. I've never seen the implemented and the details are important to get right.
Where I live, I'd be far better off not buying the tickets. The fine is less than 2 months with a pass and I'm checked 2-3 times a year. Yet most of these checks don't find anyone without a ticket. Monthly ticket costs about 1.5% of average monthly income for that city, less than 4% of minimal wage. I'm quite convinced that reasonable pricing is the key.
That's probably a significant part of it. Also accessibility of the monthly passes. I used to live near a rail stop in Tempe/Phx area, and would use it when I had to go to the airport or to Downtown Phx as it was easier than dealing with parking. The ticket kiosks were a bit of a pain, but easy enough, widely available and not overly expensive.
I didn't use it that much, but did see ticket checks on one of the trips, nobody was without one.
Now you have to collect those fines. Good luck with that. Only true frictionless solution is fully state funded.
san francisco operates at the level of IDGAF that allows people of all income to ride buses and trams without a ticket
Yes, and they have a nearly-$1 billion budget deficit.
The way you pay for those buses is also kinda ridiculous. You're supposed to know that it costs something like $1.75 and you're supposed to have the exact amount in cash, no change given. But maybe it changed since 2016.
I'll likely mangle the explanation but this sort of policy does not fair well when there is a large divide between have/have-not and little/no social safety net.
If you are poverty level you will be forever stuck in this cycle: Ticket/fine, court, loss of income, etc. What might work is simply granting free access below a certain income threshold.
What many people do not realize is that one function of tickets is to prevent access to public transportation to people below a certain income threshold. If you do not, you have people using public transport as homeless shelter, urinate, smell badly, openly doing drugs, etc which leads to normal people stopping using public transport and then happily defunding it (as nobody reasonable uses it anymore - too dangerous and unpleasant).
Then make those activities against policy and have transit police.
The solution to bad behavior shouldn't involve cutting off poor people from basic services they need to improve their condition.
There should be a program for the poor for sure.
Also a program for free rides to places like abuse shelters (for all genders - battered women is sexist talk!), voting booths and others similar locations should be in place - if you are going to one of them the checker verifies that are on the direct route to such a place and gives you a ticket - once you get there they validate your ticket - while if you don't arrive they send the police looking for you (in the case of abuse not arriving is a sign of urgent trouble, in other cases the police can arrest you when they feel like it)
How does putting NFC in the tickets prevent this?
Interesting! It's a good way to test how successful the city is with their education systems. We could try it out one day a year at least.
Differentiate nomal daily sales rates within the test day, observe the trend year by year. Sounds naive, would be lovely if it works.
There was a push for a gated system here, some years ago. The vendor tried to sell it on massive cost savings...and was publicly humiliated by a bunch of geeks with an Excel table. Turns out, installing and running the gates would, at best, bring parity with random ticket inspections+fines - while impeding passenger flow as a bonus.
It's not necessarily a matter of education: just the feeling of "not worth freeloading (at the price), I'm likely to get caught anyway" is sufficient.
But there still needs to be some sort of validator that you need to use, doesn't it? I've been to two cities with a similar system where you're trusted, Helsinki and Berlin. In Helsinki there are validators that people tap some kind of multiple-trip card on. In Berlin there are very analog paper tickets that you have to put into a "Drucker" on the platform, it stamps it with the date, time, and station name.
It depends if the tickets are trip based or time based, for time based system you don't always need validator.
I have visited Prague in 2019 and their subway had no barriers, ticket machines were tucked somewhere in the corner so that I had to actively look around. Interestingly the metal poles where sticking out of the floor up to waist height with a spacing like that they used to have validators on them before.
Since I had a 3 day ticket and I validated it on the bus when going from the airport I didn't need a validator. Their trams and buses had validators in usual places, so subway probably has them too but not in an obvious place or the ticket machines already print ticket with time on it so you don't need to validate it.
Calgary's light rail is like this, at least to-date. I don't know if fare compliance is an issue, but security and homelessness is and that may add physical fare-only barriers in the near future
Yes, in high trust societies, you can do things like this.
Today we have to lock deodorant and toothbrushes behind bars in our pharmacies so it's not looted. We are not the same.
Seattle’s light rail also works this way: no ticket barriers and occasional ticket checks.
I can't see big technical limitations resulting in slow QRCode scanning. We manage to detect fast cars going 120mph to fine them, we can read fingerprints instantly through a screen. We can take pictures of galaxies light years away.
30 years ago you could kill ducks with the NES guns instantly and it worked by detecting pixels.
I'm sure we can figure out how to analyze black squares and turn them into a number under 50ms.
Touch x against y versus line this weird printed shape up at just the right angle in good lighting conditions. I feel like NFC is much easier to tell older folks how to use as well.
I'm all for the "we have technology why tf don't we use it, why aren't we better at it" argument, but the truth is that a lot of tech/systems in transport & other areas are retro af and new stuff gets shoe-horned in with all the caveats of a shoe-horning in.
Stuff doesn't get upgraded often, because it's expensive, because all of us vote for politicians that grant expensive/overpriced gov contracts putting money into them and their mates' back pockets. We'd be able to refresh public use tech all the time if it was non or low profit, never gonna happen tho.
Look at how much it cost Wales to change 30mph signs to 20mph: 34m£! And that's just for a few small areas, not everywhere they wanted to do. How in the f u c k, do you spend 34m taking down and putting up some signs? Those are ludicrous prices & all of us just completely ignore it bc we're too busy arguing about skin colour, which sex the person I sleep with is, or trans people being in the bathroom they want to be in, etc. Honestly.
None of that matter. QR code can be read on any angle because of the 3 position detection patterns it comes with, by design.
Lighting conditions are not a problem on tickets (which is what the article is about) because you can illuminate the paper from the camera.
QRCode were fast on assembly lines two decades ago. They were invented in the nineties, at a time where we had slow processors and shitty cameras.
Actually, they do matter.
Assembly lines give you GREAT control over where the code is located, how it's lit (consistently), and what you do on read error (can't shunt off the passenger to a read error bin, so they don't hold up the line). Rotational angle doesn't matter, perspective skew does. And then - it's a leaf of paper, so you get folds and obscured parts (yes, correctable...up to a point).
Assembly lines are dirty, full of parasites and with broken lights all the time.
We can create live deep fakes or detect complex objects in live feeds of random webcams.
We certainly can correct a few shadows and distortions on a flat piece of paper we formatted, showing a basic symbol we designed and printed, pushed against a sensor we control, on a device we can light and shape the way we want.
NFC fails as well, you can fold the ticket just and it will break the antena.
Of course if it's a reusable ticket on a rigid medium, it won't happen. But neither for QRCode.
The Stockholm Metro and public transport uses QRs, but on phones, and it's awful. The huge variance in people's shitty broken, dim phones make it take 3-4 tries sometimes. Infuriating! The scanners themselves are brilliant though, but nobody wants to stand in line for some printer machine and need to carry a flimsy bit of paper around.
When I was there they also had NFC readers you can tap your credit card or phone on.
The article talks about tickets with chips in it, which means you could provide the same ticket with qr code, only cheaper and less polluting.
No variance.
People can then use nfc with their phone, which doesn't have the pollution problem.
Lol, that's the joke.
QR Codes were invented by Denso (automaker own) / Toyota. For high speed assembly line processes. Lul.
In 1994, no less.
I don't think people realize how limited the hardware was at the time.
They think because their phone is slow at scanning QR codes, that's how it must be. But the phone is not a dedicated device for QRCode scanning.
It's like someone saying they get blurry pics of cars on the highway so clearly speed limits are not possible to check automatically.
I'm not sure that necessarily explains the need for single-use NFC tickets, though. There could be a more durable serial-use or permanent card with NFC that regular commuters could buy, and if those commuters are the vast majority of rush hour passengers, it might not be such a problem if single-use tickets had a slightly slower system.
Of course that'd mean having two recognition mechanisms, so the operator might opt for NFC and chips for single-use tickets anyway to make the system simpler. But somehow having single-use tickets with chips on them does seem wasteful to me.
We have those, with two recognition systems. The system the article describes is for the low count, disposable fares (a few tickets or a 3 day pass). Most people in Montreal have a chip card (the OPUS) which is reusable (and 5$ to buy).
The OPUS is also super interesting because it's a stored value card that holds the tokens on the card as opposed to a simple ID. The system was developed when cellular connectivity was still spotty, so they needed a card that would work on buses without internet access. It's pretty bad from a UX point of view though: you can only store a few different kind of fares, you can't recharge the card online (until recently you had to go to a terminal to do it, now there is a NFC phone app), you can't declare a card stolen, etc.
But why are there disposable tickets at all? Even if you're just visiting, buy a transit card and use it, then get your deposit back when you leave (or keep it as a keepsake).
The idea that you still need single-use tickets for any use-case once you have a working transit card is just bonkers. You don't, stop making them.
Ok, that makes sense then. I know that systems with non-disposable cards exist, and we also have one in the Helsinki metro area. I think our present system assumes continuous connectivity, though. Now and then you see buses with the terminal in a non-functioning state. Ends up being a free ride. (You can also buy unlimited travel within a given zone for x days at a time, which is what those who use public transit daily usually get.)
I think most people nowadays use a phone app rather than the card, though. But we also don't have gates at stations, and it's more of a trust and ticket inspections system similarly to what someone said about Norway.
Japan has the Pasmo system which is weird in that it's actually more like a prepaid debit-style card that you can use not only on most public transit but also as a payment method at some shops etc. You can charge it using teller machines at stations. I can't remember the details, though.
Taipei has single use NFC tokens that people can buy, but they are non-disposable. Instead, they are coin shaped, and are deposited in the ticket machine at the end of the trip so they can be re-used.
COOL
Can confirm that in Montreal there is a permanent version of this card (la carte OPUS) on which you can reload more tickets.
There are even semi permanent ones you can buy, which are good for say 1 day, 1 weekend, or contain 10 passes.
1000s of people leaving a stadium faces the same latency: not a WFH/WFO issue
Haha, absolutely! Just to generalize, those thousands of people can also watch the match by streaming, right? It's all about remote versus physical activities.
We can't shift everything into remote mode. However, we don't need to hustle into physical mode every day either. Yeah, yin yang complexity, balancing everything out.
i’m not a sports fan, but the feeling of being there can’t be compared to watching the event from home. this is not the part to optimize, in my opinion.
Not really a comparable thing versus the morning/evening rush every single weekday when forcing people in-office. It's the scale that makes it an issue, 1000s of people is nothing and more of an occasional spike.
See how London deals with toob stations for pride, for example, by closing and controlling some, exit only periods close to the event, open ticket gates, etc.
That latency is time stolen from the other people who are already on transit (or waiting in line to get on) who get there later. All this latency is the type of thing that makes people want to quit using transit and just get a car. (and then build more roads to deal with congestion - though road users often have more options to avoid this latency and overall generally go faster than transit despite the congestion - remember it is end to end trip time that matters not time to get through a bottleneck)
NYC OMNY allows for direct payment from a debit/credit card via NFC at the turnstile. this has privacy issues but i think they're ameliorated if you use a smartphone.
i think you can buy a transit payment card if you need one.
no paper tickets. cool ephemera but pretty wasteful.
would be pretty cool if/when we see a day where provably private cryptocurrency microtransactions allow for both real privacy and the 7 day fare cap feature.
I like London’s version of this. You can just tap your credit card or phone at any station, and it will even stop charging you after you rack up £8 in payments over the course of a day. Just pretends you had bought a day pass in the first place.
Really leaves a good impression, knowing that they could have gouged you but chose not to.
New York also does this, except weekly. https://omny.info/fares
Yes, super easy to use. And if you don't want to use a bankcard or phone you can buy a dedicated 'oyster' card and top it up as required. They all use the same card reader.
Crypto isn't private as traceability is an inherent requirement for crypto to operate.
Anyway with OMNY.
You just buy a OMNY card and load it with cash if you want privacy. They are being slow to roll the vending machines for these out due to vendor issues but it's growing and they can't discontinue the MetroCard until they have all the vending machines in place.
Why would a QR code require Internet, or an app? You could just print it on paper and track the corresponding balance on the server side. To my understanding this is what most transit networks do anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from modifying their balance on the card itself.
(The optical scanning argument makes sense, however.)
Internet is how you get from the client side to the server side. Maybe not internet but some-kind-of-net, and that has latency, failures etc.
Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency.
Sure, but is this a serious design pressure? I've been on a lot of EU train and trolley networks that have a POS terminal on the train for direct sales, which are already doing networking both for the card transaction and to issue the ticket.
(Again to be clear: I'm not saying a QR is better. But I don't think connectivity is a unique problem, since systems that use NFC without tying into payment cards are almost certainly using connectivity to make up for the lack of tamper resistance.)
Even for single-use tickets, the turnstiles on the entire system need to somehow know that you've used your QR code the moment you did it. This requires them all to be connected to some sort of central server. There's a reason why single-use tickets either somehow store the validation mark on the ticket itself (NFC, magnetic stripe, paper that you have to stamp) or get taken away from you (tokens).
On those on which this was attempted that I know of, this synchronization is far from instant. I was wrong in my other comment, in St Petersburg metro it only takes two hours for a dumped and restored card to be blocked, but you can apparently do this indefinitely on buses and trams because they aren't (weren't?) networked: https://web.archive.org/web/20170323213524/https://habrahabr...
I would like to point out that there is an implicit assumption here that we actually need a ticket system for public transport.
The general concept is “the cost of the price”. Which is something to consider for public goods. If the prices would be zero, the cost of a ticket system would also be zero.
It's kind of silly how contentious this subject is.
The majority opinion is that we all pay for public works projects even if they don't benefit us, but for some reason, transit must be self-funded. It's odd, to say the least.
It makes sense if enough people with influence over lawmaking and government have a vested interest in benefiting from “free” infrastructure and some level of friction to use public transit. Add a pinch of “public transit is useless anyway, I have a chauffeur” and here you are.
It is completely counter-productive and damaging to the economy and the environment, but it is not that odd, unfortunately.
FWIW, even in places like Estonia, which has a free public transport (bus only?) system, the tickets are still sold/used/checked. Reportedly to get usage numbers and to cost-optimize the routes.
Each resident/citizen can buy a public transport card, then tie it to their Gov ID and then tap it everywhere. You could argue that this could be replaced by some vision tech but I guess this is simpler and has dual use (visitors can purchase the card and pay instead of using for free).
The UK rail network already supports QR codes, with the busiest station handling over 80M entries/exits per year.
Meanwhile, the integrated subway/overground/bus network in London supports direct payment with NFC smartphones, without the need for an intermediate "smart" paper ticket; the infrastructure for vending those; or the (not insignificant) cost of producing the tickets. Not sure what Montreal was thinking!
Even better, London doesn’t need NFC smartphones: if you have a chip bank card with a chip for tap payments, just tap that. For those of us with smart watches, they do the metro fast pay thing as well, so I literally just tap my watch without having to press anything or get anything out of my pocket. If my watch battery is dead, I can just a bank card.
The only advantage to having Oyster is if you’re travelling enough to justify a monthly pass (daily and weekly caps are respected on bank card taps), or longer.
I travel a lot across North America and EMEA, always glad to get home and deal with London’s transport network: it’s the only one that is really designed around, built for and feels invested in the passenger experience.
Good point, the choices are: smartphone, smart watch, physical bank card (credit or debit), and pre-paid "Oyster" card (think pre-paid debit card specific to the London public transport network), and, yes, legacy paper mag-stripe tickets.
I ran into this in France, where the ticket station used QR codes & NFC. The QR code readers are scratched up meaning printed copies without backlight didn’t work. And iPhone opens Apple wallet when you bring it near a NFC reader, hiding the QR code on your screen.
https://atadistance.net/2024/05/31/jr-east-and-tokyo-private...