[NoZebra120vClip]

During the COVID outbreak, my public transit provider began to neglect their fareboxes (partly because everyone was boarding in the rear and didn't bother to pay fares anyway.)

I noticed that the boxes were still broken and unmaintained. I put 2 and 2 together and realized that a mobile "upgrade" was coming soon, so I kept my eyes out. And sure enough, I got myself invited to participate in the pilot project with the upgraded app.

The deadlines slipped twice but the pilot began in mid-January. So far I have not had glitches with scanning or boarding. But let me tell you.

There are disclaimers in the FAQ. Since the mobile passes are QR-based and not NFC, they absolutely require WAN connectivity on both sides in order to activate a pass. My initial testing indicated that a loss of connectivity will not invalidate an active pass, because it's endowed with a built-in expiration countdown. But we shall see.

The FAQ also says straight out, of course, that the customer must keep the phone charged in order to use the pass. Of course it goes without saying that your phone must be functional in order to scan the thing. So that's a whole tech stack that could go awry and strand you if you don't take precautions.

Hey, this may reduce fraud and friction at the farebox. I don't know. Many people will love not having another thing to lose or the convenience of purchasing passes without going somewhere (they cost way more on board a bus.) But the Luddite in me doesn't want this. I'd much rather carry around an old reliable paper-based pass, and I will go back to that for as long as I can get away with it.

But I won't turn down a $75 gift card to play along with the pilot test.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Of course it goes without saying that your phone must be functional in order to scan the thing. So that's a whole tech stack that could go awry and strand you if you don't take precautions

It could go awry if Google fucked up, Samsung/phone manufacturer fucks up, battery or charger fucks up, software developer fucks up, internet, etc, etc.

we are replacing reliable sustems with fragile ones everywhere

[shortcake27]

A tangential story from Melbourne - you’re required to replace your Myki every ~7 years because of its shitty implementation, and when you do, it disables auto topup. However, when you get a new card, you also can’t immediately enable auto topup - you have to wait some time until the card is transferred. So a friend of mine had this happen and wasn’t able to touch onto the tram the following morning because they had no balance. Trams don’t have Myki machines, and there was no machine at their stop. Topping up online can take up to 24h. Paper tickets were removed to push Myki. So there was no way for them to pay the fare, but they had to get to work. Of course, ticket inspectors rocked up and fined them. It is genuinely incredible that commuters are expected to either pay a fine or be late to work because of shortcomings in the Myki system.

[vaidhy]

You cannot take a cab or something else? This seems similar to the digital piracy issue. It is inconvenient, so I decided to do something illegal.

Otoh, I have seen Seattle bus drivers wave off the fare in some cases.

[ClumsyPilot]

I've never been to Melbourne, but when tube is down in London, the whole city grinds to a halt, you can't get home for hours and people die because ambulance can't get through

[LtWorf]

In sweden Coop supermarkets were closed for a weekend because they rely on some cloud thingy from USA that had gotten a ransomware.

It was their billing system, you couldn't pay cash, they had no way to record it.

[rejectfinite]

You are halfway there.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/coop-supermar...

This issue was that Visma (the MSP COOP uses for the Teller systems) had their Kaseya VSA server open to the internet and thus got affected by this.

An RMM itself is fine, needed to manage systems.

Do you know how many Swedish companies is on Office 365 + some RMM? A lot. lmao

We also have our own shit break all the time like Swish made by our banks.

[LtWorf]

Oh visma! My job uses that for our salaries. I feel better now! :'(

I don't have swish. I have trust issues. Most people in sweden are very prone to give trust it seems.

[vlovich123]

My iPhone supports transit passes even when the battery is dead. I don’t think this is an intractable problem and indeed the designers of NFC designed for this problem: the NFC payment system provides the juice required for the SE chip to do it’s thing.

QR code as transit passes aren’t great but eventually the worse designs will fade out. NFC is a way superior piece of tech and way faster too - just tap your phone and go. I was pleasantly surprised that transfers worked seamlessly this way too.

[exikyut]

Wow. Where are the API docs for this??

[vageli]

It is a feature in iOS called Express Cards: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/express-cards-with-...

[osclarto]

I live in Berlin and use the official BVG app for using the public transport here. it bugs out temporarily fairly regularly and I have to make the decision whether to buy a paper ticket to cover me (incurring extra expense) while the app isn't working or to risk it and hope the ticket inspector doesn't stop me/shows me leniency when I demonstrate the non-functioning app. extremely annoying

[wodenokoto]

The best tech solution I’ve yet to see is simply accepting credit/debit cards.

Checking in, they can charge you minimum fare and checking out they can charge you remainder.

They could also charge you maximum fare and return remainder on checkout.

You can even keep track of card and give discounts for multiple rides.

All without registration. Works with watches and phones too.

[Symbiote]

The London system makes a single charge at the end of each day, to reduce possible fees incurred by foreign cards etc.

I think they set up a special protocol with Visa and Mastercard to allow this.

[tobylane]

> I think they set up a special protocol with Visa and Mastercard to allow this.

Yes, called Contactless Transit Framework. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/policy-and-guidance/reports-pub...

[domh]

This is how the London Underground works now. Used to require an Oyster card but has worked with contactless cards for a good few years at this point.

[harvey9]

Yes. And they still honour the daily fare cap with this payment method, and you can register your card and access an online fare statement.

[tialaramex]

And the weekly cap. Unless you are staying for a while (e.g. working here for a month, overseas leg of a degree with-a-year-abroad) you can just tap into all of London's transport with your payment card and it's simpler without costing extra.

[iggldiggl]

Although the weekly cap is always a fixed Monday to Sunday period, so if your arrival/departure dates don't match up with that, you can end up paying an additional capping period as compared to a dedicated travelcard (which can start on any day of the week).

The daily or weekly pay-as-you-go capping also can't be combined with rail tickets beyond the TfL/Oyster zones (whereas a travelcard can, even if it's on Oyster), and if you're a transit nerd, the maximum journey times allowed with pay-as-you-go can occasionally be annoying.

Having said that, I do concede that contactless payment is pretty neat, and I did make use of it, too, if I was staying less than a week in London, but all in all I'd still be a bit unhappy if e.g. the weekly travelcards were simply discontinued.

[kevinh456]

Coming from the states, tap in/tap out with my watch on the underground was so easy.

[JimDabell]

Same with the buses in London, and all public transport in Singapore.

[NoZebra120vClip]

Our system uesd to accept credit/debit. Unfortunately on a bus circa 1999, you don't have an always-available connection to the payment processing center, so you settle all the transactions back at the barn.

One of my so-called friends just carried around an expired credit card, and rode the bus with impunity. The fare box accepted anything that seemed legit. So it's reasonable to see why that sort of payment method was discontinued with prejudice.

(Of course there's no reason not to bring it back with connectivity improvements, but they'd rather push mobile fares at the expense of something actually convenient to people in the economic bracket of "transit rider".)

[kotaKat]

That was also an old exploit on the GTE Airfone systems on aircraft of the same vintage. It didn't do credit verification in air, and accepted any expired calling or credit card and gave you phree phone calls at 35,000 feet. Only when the plane landed and the data downloaded did GTE find out they got stiffed. ;)

[nly]

Yeah but we have chip and pin and NFC now, so it's an active protocol between card and reader

[ErikCorry]

Seems like this could be fixed with a blacklist that was downloaded to the terminals periodically.

[beAbU]

We have this in South Africa, on the service between Pretoria and Johannesburg called the Gautrain.

It works with tap cards, both debit and credit. Can even be used to get in and out of the parking by tapping at the boom gate at entrance/exit.

You can buy a special Gautrain card that uses the same hardware. But the only benefit of the dedicated card is for folks that travel frequently, as you can buy discounted prepaid fare, something like 40 trips to be used in 20 days, for half price.

Only real risk is if you carry both a credit and debit card, and mix them up during the scan in/out process. They then charge maximum fare on both cards.

[ErikCorry]

Good luck finding out ahead of time whether your foreign card is going to be accepted by the system.

Also seems difficult for children who don't generally have credit cards.

[sofixa]

> Good luck finding out ahead of time whether your foreign card is going to be accepted by the system.

On the tills themselves there's all the signs of all the accepted cards and it was a fairly exhaustive list. It's also probably available online, so it should be pretty easy to check ahead of time.

[ErikCorry]

"Many contactless cards issued outside the UK can be used to pay as you go for travel (overseas transaction fees may apply):

American Express (AMEX) MasterCard and Maestro (some cards issued in the USA, Canada and the Netherlands aren't accepted) Visa and V PAY (some cards issued outside the UK aren't accepted)"

So no you can't tell ahead of time.

[Symbiote]

In Britain banks will give debit cards to children from age 11, and prepaid cards from age 6.

Although to get the child rate (half price) you need to show ID (if it's not obvious) and get the native Oyster card.

[countrymile]

Children travel for free on transport for london

[m01]

>=11 year olds need to for example pay for the tube: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel.

[madeofpalk]

You can still purchase a paper NFC ticket.

[tazjin]

Moscow metro does this. In very busy stations only the turnstiles at the sides have this functionality though, as the native NFC cards ("Тройка") are much faster (contactless payments can take O(seconds), which is a lot when there's 50k people trying to get through).

[Symbiote]

London managed to make the contactless payment almost as fast as the native (Oyster Card) payment.

It is perceivably slower, I'd estimate 0.8 seconds vs 0.5 seconds or something like that.

Close enough that one person trying to use the wrong turnstile would remove any benefit from separating them. Anyway, 60% of passengers use it now.

[tazjin]

I remember contactless being okay in London when I lived there, but I'd always switch queues immediately if someone pulled out a phone to pay. Those people frequently need a good five seconds to pay ...

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

pretty sure they do this in Vancouver bc now. i think i heard san Francisco is starting it too now. but i haven't tried either first hand

[mixmastamyk]

A tap card is a nice middle ground. No idea why people are dying to drag so much complexity into a simple transaction.

[mixmastamyk]

Oh I remember, so they can sell your data.

[totetsu]

Am I miss remembering or can the nfc mobile train passes in Japan be used even with a dead battery?

[larouxn]

Yes, I believe this is correct as the terminal you tap/place your card/phone near transits enough power wirelessly to read the NFC (F) data or so I have read. The NFC (Felica) + Osaifu-Keitai + Suica/Passmo system is quite interesting and super reliable.

Source: on a train in Tokyo right now

[netsharc]

Sounds like an iPhone feature: https://www.techradar.com/news/apples-iphone-xs-has-a-game-c...

The Pasmo/Suica cards are intriguing, they are NFC, but also store the last few transactions on the card itself, there are also mobile apps for scanning these cards to see how much credit you have left and list the above-mentioned transactions.

[kalleboo]

My Japanese feature phone back in 2009 could also use Mobile Suica with a dead battery. I believe at the time the NFC wasn't active like on the iPhone but a passive "card" that was reprogrammed by the phone and didn't need power.

The iPhone only got this "power reserve" recently.

[shortcake27]

I’m a huge fan of the Pasmo/Suica cards. They’re easy to obtain and easy to accept payments, so uptake is huge (if memory serves me correctly, literally accepted everywhere?). You get most of the benefits of card payments (fast, no fiddling with change, no “do you have a smaller note”), but you also maintain anonymity which is a common argument I hear against cards in Germany and why card payments are so rare there (at least in 2017, I don’t know if the situation has changed).

[leipert]

In Germany the pandemic had quite an impact. From 2019 to 2021 cash payments dropped by ~12%, down to 38% of transactions.

What’s more important, loads of shops eg bakeries have card terminals now.

Source: https://www.papershift.com/blog/die-kartenzahlung-ist-in-deu...

[netsharc]

Although the chances of formite transmission (i.e. through touch) is apparently quite low: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...

Disclaimer: Everyone seems to have their own level of risk tolerance/acceptance with Covid.

[iggldiggl]

Something like that (for general payments, not for public transport) used to exist in Germany ("Geldkarte"), but it never became a big success and is now being discontinued. And personally speaking – not being able to easily look up how much money is stored on that card is somewhat annoying, so I'd rather continue carrying cash in that case.

[totetsu]

They’re not quit accepted everywhere. Mostly in high convenience, small purchase places. You can get multiples of them for maximum privacy, but they’re 500yen each to purchase.

[numpad0]

It was a feature all along since flip phones implementation, which was replicated and one-upped on iPhone. Phone implementations run from leftover charges on empty battery, not by power from the reader(which requires a coil).

[madeofpalk]

> Since the mobile passes are QR-based and not NFC, they absolutely require WAN connectivity on both sides in order to activate a pass.

Why they rolling out QR-based public transit ticketing in 2023 when NFC (which all phone platforms support even with a flat battery) solutions are table-stakes now?

[folmar]

Maybe all phone OSes (I'm too lazy to check) but far from all phones. For example a popular budget model Realme C25Y does not have NFC, or in general terms anything that is primary designed for the Chinese market, where payments are made through WeChat with QR codes, usually misses it.

[NoZebra120vClip]

There is actually already a system of near-field passes that has been in place for several years and was supported by the old fare machines and bus boxes. The new QR scanners also appear to have an NFC scan icon on them. So I believe they're future-proof.

[Operyl]

Lowest bidder, government procurement is fun.

[TEP_Kim_Il_Sung]

Why not go all the way and tie your ID, medical info, and online presence to the phone, that way they can cancel your toll pass and life when you inevitably do, say or think something the ruling party doesn't like.

[nischalsamji]

This sounds like valley metro