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Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

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Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#211

Post by hwatson »

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #152
nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> littered with them. I don't see that. The ticket barriers are programmed to retain used tickets. And please lay-off the "contrarian" slurs, I'm just telling you what I see with my eyes each day. If you looked up from your phone you might notice too :)

ScotRail have started to print tickets with QR codes on them, which unfortunately are an awkward size (far bigger than a credit card, even larger than a £20), come as a single strip without a perforated edge to tear, and are generally very low quality. I full expect these to become a common sight on the ground as they're not eaten by machines and difficult to store even in your wallet.

It’s a shame these have become more commonplace.

Northern started issuing them instead of cardboard tickets a few years ago and other TOCs followed along after Network Rail/Cubic finished adding barcode readers to ~all ticket barriers.

I understand why: paper barcode-only tickets are significantly cheaper than cardboard tickets (their lack of a magstripe allows any generic thermal printer to be used), but their larger form factor makes them a definite UX downgrade.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#212

Post by kotaKat »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #94
wodenokoto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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. ;)

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#213

Post by paganel »

tjoff wrote: post #154
paganel wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truck toll is not 20x more. Yes, that was my exact point. The car owners (of which I'm one) subsidise cheaper food for many not car-owners (many of them, presumably, poorer people) by paying more expensive road tolls relative to our vehicles' sizes. And that's good. Make road toll for trucks commensurate to the real wear they're adding to the roads then you're increasing the price of food (by increasing the cos…

That's a very roundabout way to justify it though. How much would toll really affect food prices per person? And is there really no other way to offset that?

> How much would toll really affect food prices per person?

Transportation costs (of which toll costs are a reasonable part, my brother is a lorry driver, I would know) are a big part of food costs, what's "roundabout" about it? That's how the economy works, that's how putting food on people's tables works.

> And is there really no other way to offset that?

No, one cannot offset it that by whooshing it way or by creating a clever phone app for it. This is real life, not Silicon Valley-make believe. People's lives depend on this, on the price of food, that is.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#214

Post by paganel »

astrange wrote: post #192
paganel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also adds to the price of food that gets transported from one place to another, and, as such, acts as a regressive tax on people who pay the biggest part of their income on their basic needs (like food). That's one of the main reasons why I don't get the "death to cars!" movement and why I regard it as mostly middle-class privileged discourse: no cars means fewer or worst roads, means food being a lot more expensi…

Wouldn't say food is especially expensive in Japan or that they don't have enough roads.

Yes, exactly, because the "small" cars are paying the roads for the trucks transporting the food (through relatively higher tolls, through direct or indirect taxation applied on "small" cars' owners etc).

Take the small cars completely out of the equation (like banning them) and you're putting all the costs of building those roads on whom?

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#215

Post by Symbiote »

tazjin wrote: post #172
wodenokoto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#216

Post by Symbiote »

ErikCorry wrote: post #114
wodenokoto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#217

Post by mixmastamyk »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #61
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #21

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…

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

Oh I remember, so they can sell your data.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#218

Post by Symbiote »

LtWorf wrote: post #200
nkellenicki wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the OP claimed at all. Paper tickets still exist. A mobile phone is not requisite. People can choose the option that works for them.

Come here in Sweden. The main station of the 2nd biggest city has TWO ticket machines. The minor stations have none. You're expected to use the phone.

I wondered on a recent trip where I was supposed to add credit to a Västtrafik card I had from a previous trip.

In Denmark, there are equivalent top-up machines at almost every rail and metro station. (The exceptions are some very rural lines, where machines are on trains instead.)

At the central station in Copenhagen there must be at least 10 machines, if not more. There are also two SJ ticket machines! Sorry Gothenburg.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#219

Post by Symbiote »

ghaff wrote: post #186
IanCal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever actually been on a train in the UK? Ticket inspectors will go on to do anyone that's ready and come back - they're not bemused by someone without their ticket ready. And people constantly also fumble for their tickets then present an old ticket, then the return instead of the outgoing one, then the seat reservation not the ticket etc. My local station doesn't sell tickets. It has no office. I can buy an…

I don't remember it being so bad on my last trip, but a number of years back two of us were doing a long distance walk in England. I remember train tickets being this exercise of "Which of these cards are the right ones to feed into the turnstile?" while people were piling up behind us. In general, transit systems do a pretty terrible job of usability testing for people who aren't so used to the system that it's seco…

I think the "slightly easier to read" which the article refers to was done to remove the confusion of separate tickets for the journey and the reserved seat.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#220

Post by [deleted] »

krisoft wrote: post #100
iudqnolq wrote: post #52

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…

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