London's contactless ticket payment system for sale in £15m deal

Re: A good thing

if other cities don't have this yet, they'll want it.

They've had years to negotiate a deal, and most haven't, preferring to reinvent crap, non-interoperable systems that have little or no NFC content. I recently used public transport in Nottingham, and the payment system for the new(ish) tram was old skool tickets bought from an overly complicated vending machine. And Oyster was introduced thirteen years ago.

All credit to TfL who've made a pretty good job of contactless payments, a pity that other transport authorities have not got off their lazy fat arses and learned a whole lot quicker.

Re: A good thing

I think the capping is a policy thing, sadly. The Vancouver system is not set up to do it; if you do ten regular journeys in a day you pay for ten regular journeys, even though there's a flat-rate all-day fare that's much cheaper. If you want the all-day fare you have to know about it and specifically load it onto your card before you make a trip. Which is really pretty crappy, and they don't have a good excuse for it, so far as I can tell, especially since by all accounts the system is basically the same as Oyster so it certainly ought to be capable. http://askcompass.ca/?QuestionID=1387 (same applies for day pass).

Re: A good thing

Not needing to own/top-up an Oyster Card is incredibly handy

It's not so good if you're a non-UK visitor. Having to use a debit card for lots of small payments gets expensive fast with bank commissions, much easier to have an Oyster card & top it up with 20 quid at a time.

Re: A good thing

"and the prices are capped as with Oyster so you never pay more than the equivalent all day travelcard"

Yeah, it's amazing how all this computer stuff and technolgy can not only make things easier but also keep the prices down to a reasonable level for the paying customers.

A certain northern university have introduced camera controlled parking. You arrive, preferably pre-booked if a visitor, and on leaving you pay £7 for having parked. If you don't pay, they automatically get the car owners details from DVLA and send a PCN. It's a shame all that computing power and technology can't distinguish between parking for an hour and parking all day so *all* parking costs £7. FFS, they could charge by the minute with that tech, especially since the only payment method is by credit/debit card. But I suppose they have to recoup the cost of the new multi-story car-park somehow. It used to cost a fiver before they built that. Hardly an inflation price rise. Bastards</rant>

Something's not right in the figures.

"TfL claims 65,000 journeys a day are being made using contactless with 500,000 million journeys made using contactless since its introduction."

If that "500,000 million" is right then at 65k journeys a day it would imply it's been running for 21 thousand years. If it's really only 500,000 journeys then it's only been running for just over a week?!

"TfL is the body responsible for London’s buses, trains, and underground, reckons its system now accounts for one in 10 of the UK’s contactless payments."

"Contactless payments used for 1bn UK purchases in 2015"

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/26/contactless-cards-purchases-spending

So 100 million contactless journeys a year, but 65,000 * 365 is only 24 million.

Re: Testing similar with Safety Cameras?

Have to be a pretty clever camera to recognise you from a very quick glimpse of you from your rear view mirror...

Re: Transport for Greater Manchester

Firstly, the Oyster system does not support the ITSO standard, which all UK based schemes are adopting for interoperability.

Secondly, from what I have heard, to implement the TfL/Cubic solution would be considerably more expensive than than what was chosen with ATOS.