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The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

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Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#391

Post by ghaff »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #212
Aeolun wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Make the damn train work” is not a local custom. Aside from that the UK rail system is so complicated and expensive you’d expect a manned gate at every station at the least. £150 from London to Leeds?! I can fly halfway across Europe for less…

£165.90, to be precise (anytime single). Or, if you travel late-morning to early-afternoon, £70.20 (super off-peak single). By booking weeks or months in advance, you can travel for as little as £22.50 (advance single). The unofficial BR Fares[1] website does a lot to untangle the complexity, although it can only do so much to mitigate the expense. [1]: https://www.brfares.com/

Making purchases ahead varies quite a bit across Europe. The UK seems to fall pretty hard on the you really should buy well in advance side or you're going to pay through the nose.

I used to work with someone who, even on an expense account, would roll their eyes if someone wanted them to do a last minute trip to London.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#392

Post by jasonkester »

dghughes wrote: post #368
altacc wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#393

Post by CraigJPerry »

teknologist wrote: post #353
scoot wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When all you need is a unique identifier, what's the advantage?

None in that case. But with these cards there’s less need for centralization of data storage and code logic

>> there’s less need for centralization of data storage and code logic

You make it sound like less moving parts are a bad thing :-)

I know what you're getting at though - the decentralized tolerance of network partitions and the ability to provide higher availability and faster decision speed at the entry barrier.

The system design constraints are hard but not impossible, my back of napkin maths says 5k/ticket scans per second with 99th percentile latency There's a few things in your favour when designing this system though. For example, in the case of network partition, you have geographic locality so a pen drive delivered a couple of times per day is likely feasible.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#394

Post by bluGill »

sysadmindotfail wrote: post #367
altacc wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance. 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.

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)

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#395

Post by Piskvorrr »

grugagag wrote: post #380
skeeter2020 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

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.)

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#396

Post by jasonkester »

a-dub wrote: post #348
solarized wrote: post #324

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 probl…

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…

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.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#397

Post by zulban »

lxgr wrote: post #257
zulban wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they cost just a few pennies each is a reflection of how little waste is occurring. If waste bothers you, focus on something worthwhile like canceling just one airline flight. Lifetime of a plastic opus card may even be more wasteful, by mass of plastic and chip, if not used extensively. For example, one time use is often for tourists, where a full chip opus would be very wasteful indeed.

> If waste bothers you, focus on something worthwhile like canceling just one airline flight. That's just whataboutism: If there's an alternative way of solving the same problem that generates less waste, why not use it? I find the contactless coin form factor for single rides quite clever personally, and I don't see any downsides compared to paper single-use tickets (other than that validators and gates need some st…

Just because you don't see downsides doesn't mean there aren't any. Coins are lost or broken or intentionally damaged, and may need cleaning and staff to handle and transport them. It's not zero waste. In fact I suspect the STM solution may overall have less waste. If you read the article, the chip is the size of a grain of salt.

Airline is not just whataboutism. It illustrates the absurdity of scale in your point. Imagine someone who is spending 20 minutes to save themselves 4 pennies on their electrical bill, but they are running 8 air conditioners with their windows open during a heatwave. Yes, that's whataboutism, but it's an informal fallacy, meaning I may still have a good point.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#398

Post by bluGill »

asah wrote: post #327
solarized wrote: post #324

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 probl…

1000s of people leaving a stadium faces the same latency: not a WFH/WFO issue

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)

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#399

Post by BiteCode_dev »

sippeangelo wrote: post #355
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#400

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kens wrote: post #52
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I didn’t know what kind of ticket we are talking about - folks please include a picture and some context in your blogs, for people from other places and countries

The title says "Montreal" and the second photo in the blog post shows the specific ticket. I'm not sure what else I can do here.

Photo of the ticket / ticket machine is an obvious thing to include.

Some people live on a different continents and their environment looks completely different. This is giving me same vibes as those ‘probe you are not a robot’ tests that ask you to identify things that are specific to USA’

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