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Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

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Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#91

Post by dmurray »

Symbiote wrote: post #85
fuzzfactor wrote: post #49

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.

Charging by road use definitely seems fair, but it's a problem when you have 50 major roads in the state and by historical accident only say 2 of them get tolled. North-South travellers end up subsidising East-West travellers or vice versa.

It's hard to come up with a perfectly fair system. Tolling every road is expensive and tax on fuel has its own trade offs.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#92

Post by JimDabell »

domh wrote: post #73
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.

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.

Same with the buses in London, and all public transport in Singapore.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#93

Post by paganel »

reustle wrote: post #74
fuzzfactor wrote: post #49

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…

I used to live in the US and currently live in Japan. We pay around $95 to go about 5 hours on a highway from Tokyo to Kyoto, for example. 3~ hours north is about $35. I think this more accurately charges us drivers for the resources we consume.

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 expensive.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#94

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

wodenokoto wrote: post #70
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…

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 was discontinued with prejudice.

(Of course there's no reason not to bring it back with connectivity improvements, but they'd rather push mobile fares at the expense of something actually convenient to people in the economic bracket of "transit rider".)

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#95

Post by xdfgh1112 »

switch007 wrote: post #6

> 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…

With mobile tickets I've also lost the ability to break my journey up (i.e. visit somewhere half way along a route without having to buy two tickets) which has increased the price of my journeys.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#96

Post by plugin-baby »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #95
switch007 wrote: post #6

> 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…

With mobile tickets I've also lost the ability to break my journey up (i.e. visit somewhere half way along a route without having to buy two tickets) which has increased the price of my journeys.

How have mobile tickets stopped this? Wasn’t it always against the rules, even if possible when the middle station lacked barriers?

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#97

Post by syradar »

IanCal wrote: post #77
zhte415 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do away with tickets and apps altogether and scan your national ID card. Or give everyone a national fare allowance to boot, like the national subsidy for maintenance of roads and their other associated costs.

There isn't a national id card.

There is in lots of countries…

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#98

Post by arnon »

Very nicely written, it made it very accessible to those who aren't super familiar with reverse engineering.

I'm fascinated by "transport billing" - it's such a complex problem, owing to the different infrastructure providers, different operators, fares, holidays, special events, and weird edge-case situations.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#99

Post by mnd999 »

plugin-baby wrote: post #96
xdfgh1112 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With mobile tickets I've also lost the ability to break my journey up (i.e. visit somewhere half way along a route without having to buy two tickets) which has increased the price of my journeys.

How have mobile tickets stopped this? Wasn’t it always against the rules, even if possible when the middle station lacked barriers?

No, this was always part of the rules - unless you have an Advance ticket. And as far as I know that is still the case.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#100

Post by krisoft »

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 where you would think they could afford a reliable connection if said connection goes down you can’t block the flow of people.

Reliability and speed of checking was clearly the most important features they optimised for. Security, in the sense that passengers can’t just mint tickets for themselces, is a close second.

The beauty is that every centralised reporting can be deffered. In case the centralised database is down, or the checker’s network is down, you just store the timestamp and the signed ticket data and report it once things are working again. The centralised system doesn’t even need to trust the checker computers. Railway company A cannot mint a ticket from railway company B. They don’t have the keys to do that. So they cannot fraudelently divert revenue from each other. Neither accidentally nor intentionally.

> but I'd guess there would be simpler ways to add that to a centralized system.

I’m all ears. How would you do it simpler?

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