T’other day, Ricky and I were discussing the soon-to-be-implemented smart card ticketing for Brisbane public transport.
In the conditions of use for the current trial it says that you have to “touch on” at the beginning of a journey and “touch off” at the end. To ensure that you touch off, when you touch on a large amount is deducted from your card and when you touch off the system adjusts itself to deduct the correct fare from your card. What happens if you have just enough credit for a trip? How can/does the system deduct a maximal amount from your card? It seems that this sort of system requires that cards are registered to “owners” so that the system can bill you if you default on a fare.
Another strange thing about the system that Translink seem to be building in Brisbane is that lack of control gates, which seesm to be the norm in other smart ticketing situations (in my limited understanding). Hong Kong’s Octopus card (which I have found is the most written about system) certainly has gates and this article on the relative merits of smart cards vs smart tokens also presumes that some form of gate or turnstile will be part of the wider system. Obviously, gates are a primary way to enforce one or both of touching on and off and thus lessen the incidence of fare evasion. It will be interesting to see how Translink implement their gateless system (I assume it will be a gateless system. The current trail is certainly gateless).
In related news under one of my favourite heading of unintended consequences you can buy special smart-card protectors to prevent “skimming attacks”. Obviously as soon as these type of thing were developed a Hello Kitty version was on the market within nanoseconds.
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