In the 60's I hacked the Montreal Metro's transfers, and rode free. The punched holes recorded time and date code.
The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
481–490 of 525 posts
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people can manage the existence of both an optical scanner and contactless at the self checkout grocery store, this is way overblown. A ticket needs to be printed anyways, the single use ticket with chip does not come from thin air.
But why are you making it worse and more complicated? Disposable NFC card is better, cheaper, and easier to use. The NFC doesn't need to be printed. It just needs to be dispensed. My city went from printed paper tickets, that didn't even need to be scanned, to contactless fare system with paper NFC tickets. It saves money having simpler and less used ticket machines. It helps that most people use contactless credit c…
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Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
The system can just keep track of whether the ticket has already been used before. You don't have to store the information on the ticket itself. You can store the information on a central server, connected to all the gates. The ticket itself just has to encode an ID, and then the central database contains an entry for that ID that is checked by the gate in real time. When the ticket is scanned at a gate, the database…
That server would have to process thousands of requests per second during a rush hour with very little delay. In addition to QR codes just being much more finicky than tapping a card or sticking something into a slot.
It only has to process requests inside a single station, and then periodically sync up with a central server. This doesn't sound difficult at all.
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Those activities are mostly against policy already but current political environment makes it impossible to enforce nuisance laws. Ticket price is a reasonable alternative even if it hurts a few deserving poor people.
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Makes me get out of bed and tap my phone on a specific NFC tag placed somewhere around the house, in order to turn off the alarm. Neat, but is there an advantage between this and "Place the alarm clock further from the bed"?
Not a huge advantage, but I'd say mostly range and flexibility. You may want to put the tag farther away than you could hear an alarm clock, if you want to go to another room. And you could customize the alarm so you're guided towards a different tag every day of the week, without needing multiple (or any) alarm clocks.
> You may want to put the tag farther away than you could hear an alarm clock, if you want to go to another room.
cries in studio apartment
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#486While the chip technology is interesting, I found the human factors on Montreal's public transit system to be bad. This is based on my experiences in 2023.
The reusable OPUS transit card expires after 4 years unless you have a photo registered. In almost all cities, adult transit cards don't expire and don't require photo/name registration. https://www.stm.info/en/info/fares/opus-cards-and-other-fare...
The system does not have a concept of a monetary balance ($). The system only has tickets (bought in blocks of 1, 2, or 10 with appropriate discounts) and unlimited passes (24 hr, 3 day, week, month). Note that I define a "ticket" as an abstract authorization to ride transit for one trip, not a physical object.
There is no discount for using OPUS. If you buy a block of 10 tickets, it's the same cost whether you load it onto a disposable paper card or on a plastic long-term OPUS card. There is no incentive to reduce waste.
The Greater Montreal Area is divided into fare zones, A/B/C/D. You can use any supported transport agency and vehicle (bus, subway, commuter rail, possibly others) to make your trip. Ticket/pass types have cumulative fare zones, i.e. A or AB or ABC or ABCD. This isn't wrong per se; this is just setting up a definition for what's to come.
An OPUS card is locked to one set of fare zones for the purpose of buying tickets. For example, your card might be set to zone A, or maybe zones ABC. You can only buy and spend tickets of that type. However, you can buy passes for any zones, but they are expensive and intended for long-term commuters.
A new paper card can be bought for any set of zones. e.g. If you want to travel from somewhere in zone A to somewhere in zone C, you buy a zone ABC fare ticket. A paper card cannot be reloaded after the initial purchase.
There is only tap-on, no tap-off. So if you board at zone A, there is no way for the transport system to electronically know if you exited in zone A, B, C, or D. This also means that an open payment supporting credit cards cannot deduct the correct fare amount. There are random fare inspections from human officers to ensure you hold a tapped card with the correct fare type at the location of the inspection.
In light of this entire setup, I can understand why an OPUS card is locked to one set of zones for tickets (which are counted down as you use them). If you tap your OPUS card at a reader in zone A but you own tickets of multiple zone types on the card, how does the reader know which ticket to deduct? Montreal has brought this problem on themselves by not having tap-off and also not using a money-based system.
To make matters worse, the fare vending machines at subway stations are inadequate. There are not enough of them, the menus are slow to navigate through, paying by cash or credit card may have additional frictions (e.g. cash rejected, no change, card payment failure). Thus there is often a queue to buy tickets, making the travel experience that much worse. (Meanwhile, I found Japan's ticket-vending machines to be top-notch - very clear instructions, fast machine response times, and excellent handling of cash.)
By comparison, Toronto has a different strategy and different problems on the PRESTO contactless fare card. The TTC has a flat fare and 2-hour free transfers within the system. GO transit has tap-on and tap-off for buses and trains. For a long time, there was no fare integration between transit agencies, so you had to pay separately on each system; this changed in Feb 2024 so that you pay more or less the maximum of what each agency on your trip charges rather than the sum of the components.
Japan's transit systems mostly use tap-on tap-off, even many buses, and charge by distance. (There are small exceptions like the Kyoto bus being flat fare.) Transit pricing and ticketing is almost an entirely solved problem for decades; the rest of the world can learn from them. (There are still small exceptions, like how travelling between two different IC card regions, like from Numazu to Tokyo, requires a paper ticket.)
As you can see, even if you live permanently in Montreal and own an OPUS card (e.g. zones AB), as soon as you need to make a trip outside (e.g. zones ABCD) your usual area, you need to interact with a ticket-vending machine and buy a paper card. Meanwhile, in Toronto or Japan, you hold one card and the transit systems deduct the correct amount of money based on the trip that you take. Heck, Toronto introduced open payments in 2023, so you don't even need to buy the transit card.
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
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.
Some people are passing through and only stay at a city overnight, or are just making a day trip, and getting a card and returning it for a deposit might be a hassle. You might be visiting multiple cities within a brief period, each with a different system and different card, and getting and returning a card at each sounds cumbersome. More or less the same if you occasionally visit different cities in your country or area but not often enough that you'd want to keep cards for a bunch of cities. A local might forget their card and need to make a single trip.
I can see lots of use cases for single-use tickets. All of them are technically possible to cover with a non-disposable card, of course, but that doesn't mean single-use isn't more convenient in some of them.
Nowadays phone apps might also be an option, but that can hardly be the only way of paying for public transit.
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. The antenna isn't, however. In any case, I think there's a pretty high chance these tickets will not end up in a dedicated recycling facility that can properly separate antenna from paper and recycle both, disregarding the chip. For similar reasons, Japan is phasing out even magnetic stripe sing…
> Buying a reusable token doesn't take 20 minutes more than buying a paper ticket. No, but it could expend 20x the resources, and not be used 20x as much. As the article mentions, the purpose of these paper tickets is for single-use or short term use, and the system also supports plastic cards for longer term use.
These tokens are collected at the end of each trip (or you can’t leave). This obviously only works in systems that have mandatory exit turnstiles.
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#489Comparing Montreal subway with Vancouver's skytrain: - Montreals subway stations have this gritty, distinctively french atmosphere i loved it. - Vancouvers above/below stations have no soul, distinctively anglo but above ground ones i liked. - Montreal train cars use rubber wheels to my shock! Extremely loud. - Vancouver train cars use some sort of electric system which im not familiar with ( have a few variants (new…
clean and soulless >>>>>>>>>> distinct and gritty for public transit
i'm from vancouver, and every day I take the NYC subway i wish it was cleaner and more soulless, more hospital sterility, harsh 6500K lighting, glass and stainless, and less literal grit
Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the suggestion is the QR code contains the ticket info, but that the QR code is the unique tag into the back end virtual ticket system. 1 to 3 are not relevant in that context, and 4 isn't borne out in my experience with modern readers (they're used in the bar code mix at parkrun and they read time is vanishingly fast with a smart phone, generally better than barcodes). The number of bits might increase…
NFC doesn't necessarily create any additional e-waste. In Chicago we have an NFC system, and people typically just link their phone to their account and use that to pay. I still use a physical card - so that I have a backup option in case something happens to my phone - but even there the volume of waste is trivial. I've had my current transit card for ages, and it doesn't expire until 2037. It's possible that the on…
Well, yes, but the article is about a disposable nfc ticket.