131–140 of 236 posts
> they also gain the ability to more precisely track the ticket’s usage across the network and minimise fraud. Except mobile tickets make fraud trivial - getting off the train without a ticket, at a station with a ticket barrier? Just show them your powered off phone and say 'my phone died' and they'll let you out, no questions asked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know if they do this in the UK, but using apps also gives the government the ability to profit from breakage the same way gift card programs do. The last time I had a public transport app I had to maintain a balance that could expire. The place that implemented this system also prohibited all other forms of payment as a Covid measure, and for some reason hasn’t reverted that policy yet.
In London you can use a normal contactless debit or credit card or NFC payment on a phone for public transport. This is great for Londoners, and even better for visitors who don't need to figure out what they need to buy or how to top up a card. I don't belive the ticket apps being discussed keep a balance, but I haven't used them myself.
For even more confusion, some contactless debit cards won't work the first time, but if you try them 5 mins later (presumably after the main office has done a test charge on the card), it then works fine.
> Nowadays, the industry would very much like you to ditch your paper ticket in favour of a fancy mobile barcode one (or an ITSO smartcard2); not only do they not have to spend money on printing tickets but they also gain the ability to more precisely track the ticket’s usage across the network and minimise fraud. And unsurprisingly only a subset of tickets are available on the apps. Therefore the government gets its…
As already shown in this thread, even the employees don't understand the very complicated fare rules. My manager was very proud of winning a half hour long argument with a ticket inspector about the Conditions of Carriage, but most of us just want to buy a ticket and go.
On the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state. It was bad enough having captive service stations and restaurants for overpriced products, but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago. Anyway there were only very few exits and they…
There was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
On the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state. It was bad enough having captive service stations and restaurants for overpriced products, but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago. Anyway there were only very few exits and they…
There was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
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.
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.
On the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state. It was bad enough having captive service stations and restaurants for overpriced products, but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago. Anyway there were only very few exits and they…
There was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.
I feel the no toll approach is better.
Most importantly because no toll means (the feeling of) more privacy, toll means you're being tracked. Regardless of law we all know that everything eveywhere gets stored indefinitely independent of country (if not legally then illegally if not by the toll org then by the secret service).
Secondly the country I was in with the toll approach had worse infrastructure.
Thirdly, when looking at government spending as a whole, road infrastructure (in a non tollroad country) is really not that big of an expenditure as far as I know?
Forthly, a country may (and some do) still tax road-users only by just taxing car ownership periodically. No need to invade privacy for that through toll booths or even worse: mandatory tracking devices (countries in Europe are pushing for the latter). Added bonus: you can trivially put a tax on relatively polluting vehicles if you like and use that to subsidize less polluting vehicles.
They invented a clever decentralized system based on public key cryptography, but it seems like they actually need centralized features. So they bolted some on, leaving an end result worse off than if they'd started with something simple and centralized. For example, you can ask any UK rail operator to book you a trip that includes sections run by other operators. So your purchase needs to be fed through a centralize…
> So they bolted some on, leaving an end result worse off than if they'd started with something simple and centralized. I disagree. > This setup does have the advantage that they can check tickets without needing a network connection This is the most important reason why it is implemented this way. Checking happens on rowing handheld devices which have frequently no good internet connection. Even in the turnstiles wh…
Train companies have a login to the ticket server to let them mint tickets.
Checkers, when offline just check the signature, and log to the central server later.
When online, they ask the central server for all other ticket details and check those.
Any ticket that is misused and isn't detected at the time is blacklisted, and that blacklist distributed for offline use. A blacklist of the 10 million most-misused tickets could perhaps be just 10 megabytes - easy to download/update every few hours over mobile internet.
Now, anyone can wrongly use a ticket just once, as long as they are sure the checker is offline. And if they are mistaken and the checker is online, or they reuse a ticket, they will get caught.
main benefit: tickets can be smaller (and therefore read far quicker). Tickets can also be cancelled easily. For example, train companies could send out promotional tickets which only charge you if used, and are cancelled otherwise.