Prepaid single purpose cards like Oyster (and Opal and Myki in Sydney and Melbourne which I’m more familiar with) have a huge advantage in not being linked to your legal name and address in the way your credit card is. Removing that option links every trip on public transport to a legal identity overnight.
We only have these cards due to historical quirk (quick contactless technology existed, but not in credit cards), and if we lose them, it’s another thing that we’re never getting back.
(I protested the removal of paper tickets from Sydney’s trains and busses, for what it’s worth…)
It wasn't that long ago, I am certain your comment would have been downvoted on HN.
It wasn't that long ago Google or Apple were Saint. The future is Apple Pay, Cashless, Contactless Credit Card, Crypto.
It wasn't that long ago people that worries about privacy or freedom were over reacting, paranoid, pessimistic.
It wasn't that long ago having physical Cash, topping up your Oyster / Opal / Myki / Suica / Octopus / EZ-Link / Presto or any other Top Up Prepaid Card were dumb. The future is Apple Wallet.
You can fill an anonymously purchased Oyster with actual coins at select locations. I used to fill mine with otherwise useless small change periodically. In this way the Oyster is not tied to a credit card, although of course TFL does have CCTV so if they really wanted to (e.g. you murder somebody and leave the card at the scene) they could trawl through the CCTV footage matching the times the card was used.
The purchase of credit can be linked for sure. But at least my trips can’t be tracked. I can say, use anyone’s travel card. Anyone can top up my card. I can top up with cash. Whatever. Each individual trip can’t be tied to a person.
We don’t want to lose this privacy because as mentioned. We’ll never get it back.
With credit card payment, facial recognition, cell phone GPS tracking, etc. I think they can connect you to the trip even if you used Oyster. And if they're taking photographs of the currency that ATM machines are spitting out (easily possible) there's nothing to suggest that they can't track cash transactions as well.
My thinking has always been that yes, targeted surveillance of a target in public is easy, but is it “every trip in a searchable database” easy? Facial recognition is the one here that actually does make it that easy, hence my strong opposition to it!
With enough effort, anything is possible. When it comes to hiding from authorities (or anyone, really), it's only a matter of putting up more roadblocks than they're willing to overcome.
They're human, too. Often dumb, most often uninterested and lazy. And everyone gives up at some point.
Privacy does have a cost. I was working at TfNSW at the time they were phasing out the paper tickets and the main reason they got rid of them was the enormous cost of having and maintaining all that paper ticket infrastructure. I think it was basically going to cost alot more to have the ticket infrastructure than the revenue gained back from the actual tickets due to the very small number of people still using the paper tickets.
In fact most of the decisions around ticketing were more about reducing costs and improving efficiency than reducing privacy (that was just the side effect) for example on buses people paying with cash were massively slowing down the boarding in busy areas, so they made pre-pay or opal only buses during peak hours hours in some areas to improve the on time running. Bus drivers also hated dealing with change and carrying money as well. They were already trying to phase out the use of cash on buses and I think covid accelerated that trend as they now had a great excuse to do so everywhere.
In fact even a few years ago there was already discussion of using CCTV and facial recognition to track people through stations and what they use, the idea being you could then pay for your trip the same way those Amazon supermarkets work as that would reduce the congestion at gates and allow better tracking of full trips as Opal data can't determine your exact route, only the parts where you tapped.
The reality is most people will complain far more about having to pay slightly higher ticket costs than for the loss of privacy, so it's a fairly easy decision for politicians to make and why Australia has so many sweeping surveillance powers.
>He said: "I can't imagine a situation where everyone either will have a bank account and card suitable to pay and wants to.
>She said: "One of the biggest inequalities of modern tech and the widening gap is digital poverty, because there are people who are very reliant on their digital packages who take for granted their access to the internet.
"There are still a lot of people paying in cash who could be flying under the radar.
"If you do remove one-on-one payments and totally automate there's a group of people unable to use the service properly - or [have to] illegally - because they don't have a choice."
I am so happy to read this. Not everyday you have people caring about these sort of thing. Or May be tech is mostly dominated by Silicon Valley who dont sort of give a damn.
I still think Oyster card performs better than Visa PayWave / Master PayPass or Apple Pay / Google Pay. Although none of them are anywhere near as good as Suica Card in Japan.
Private companies can, to a large extent, target and accommodate only a subset of the market.
However, a public transport system has to be for everyone. There are legal and political consequences to making it difficult or impossible for certain demographics to use public transport. There's also the fact that the most marginalised in our society are often incredibly reliant on public transport. That's why TfL and other public bodies have to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment for any policy change and take these things very seriously.
The removal of cash from buses seems (as mentioned in the article) to be a similar change. I wonder what the Equality Impact Assessment outcome was for that. Although that is less severe than removing cash as an option via removing Oyster cards entirely, as a homeless person could still reasonably use cash to top up an Oyster card and use that for the bus, instead of a contactless card - which I think a fixed address is required for?)
>Private companies can, to a large extent, target and accommodate only a subset of the market.
I absolutely agree. Except these private company were publicly advocating to abolish physical cash and top up card. Pushing their narrative towards a future which everything goes through Smartphone where the company have a strategic interest in doing so. While proclaiming themselves as the guardian of privacy and protector of their users.
This isn't the first time the subject of dropping Oyster card or any Top Up card payment in any part of the world has come up. Last time ( if I remember correctly it was 2016, roughly during the launch of Android Pay on Tfl or something like that, thinking about it now it might have been a PR piece ) there were people in the general public who really believe the future is cashless and all in Smartphone. And the general narrative at the time was dropping Oyster card some time in the future was inevitable because Tfl and other Transport companies around the world doesn't want the burden of running their own payment system in other to save cost. And if I remember correctly the answer Tfl gave at the time wasn't as clear cut as it is now.
So I am extremely happy to read a firm stand from Tfl on this issue.
This is why I roll my eyes anytime someone wants to "run government like a business". Government fundamentally must serve everyone, covering all the messy edge cases like unbanked people, and people who don't speak the native language.
Businesses look for efficiencies and that often means limiting their services to specific groups or requiring many prerequisites (either stated or implied). Government doesn't have that luxury and therefore has to be some level of inefficient. That doesn't stop government from offering modern internet-based services, it just means they have to keep the fallback process as well. For example, I can do my annual license plate renewal online with a credit card from the comfort of my home. If I don't have a credit card I can also go down to the ministry of transport office and pay in cash. A business could easily decide having physical offices all over the province is grossly expensive and make a switch to online payments only. Government doesn't (and shouldn't) have that option.
Suica or any of the FeliCa-based cards in Japan are stunning really, the ecosystem is great. They're super fast, don't require sign-ups and work anywhere in the country nowadays, even in most shops.
And you can get virtual ones on your phone these days, auto recharging via credit card. Best of both worlds, works in way more places than contactless EMV.
And it still works even if you root your phone or install LineageOS, which is also a big plus for me (it's why I can't use Google Pay).
My company did some work with TfL when Oystercards were being rolled out. A very clever bloke at work was tasked with working out an algorithm that would retrospectively minimise a passenger's spend based on their journey history - so e.g. If they'd done 9 single journeys in a week it might decide they'd have been better off buying a weekly pass, and adjust their balance accordingly. You have monthly and even annual passes to factor in as well of course.
He spent about 20 minutes one lunchtime trying to explain it to me, but it went straight over my head (I think 'alpha-beta pruning' was in there somewhere), but anyway it was all for naught as - hardly surprisingly - TfL had little appetite for software that would actually reduce their revenue.
That’s what contactless cards do now, there’s a PAYG cap. When you read about it doesn’t really sound that complex (not sure if it needed a clever bloke with an algorithm, but then what do I know?)
I guess because they couldn’t work out a way for you to purchase a travel card on your contactless card, so this was the only way to allow regular commuters to use their contactless.
Anyway it was the reason I switched over from oyster to contactless. I realised I was getting ripped off as I would always use PAYG and _sometimes_ went over the caps.
There's some complexity arising from zones, and travelcards being based on zonal travel. So it's more complex than just capping it, or comparing it to the price of a travelcard, because you have to consider different combinations of travelcard (period and zone) and which journeys to ignore, leaving at PAYG rate.
I don't know what alpha-beta pruning is, and I'm not necessarily asserting it's massively complex, and I don't know anything about/haven't worked in the area beyond as a user - just pointing out it's not as simple as it might at first seem.
Last time I used digikey, they would notify me that if I bought a few more widgets I'd be eligible for bulk pricing, which would lower my bill. Sure, they would move more widgets, but would receive less money. I was a little shocked and impressed. I did buy more widgets, and did indeed lower my bill.
I find Amazon’s functionality of “you bought this item on March Xx, 20YY” to be similar. Sometimes I’m buying more dishwasher tablets (and the notice serves only to tell me that I’m buying the same thing), but it’s definitely caused me to not re-buy a book I already owned a few times and that left me with a very positive impression of Amazon.
Yes, although it's not exactly retrospective. The trick is, each time it sees your card the system is trying to figure out what the minimum price it could charge is for everything that happened so far. The fares are designed such that it can't ever be cheaper to do more journeys†, however it might not be more expensive, so the extra cost of any completed journey is always going to be somewhere between £0 and the maximum peak single fare.
This happens live because you are shown the current balance (which needs this calculation) when completing journeys in some places, and can also check it from outside the system.
So you can see that a journey you just made cost say 10p even though obviously there are no fares that low, because 10p was the difference between the cheapest way to do your previous set of journeys, and the cheapest way to do all those journeys plus the new one.
† There are sometimes weird corner cases where e.g. travelling one extra stop and walking back is slightly cheaper but that's a different journey not an extra one.
I don't think it is? They're capped, but afaik it doesn't work out if you'd have been better off with some specific combination of prepaid travelcards and charge you that instead (which could be less than the caps in total)?
My local bus company did this. 3 trips in a day? Price caps out at a day ticket. 14 trips in a week? Price caps out at a weekly ticket. Same for the month.
It has a weird effect where I would take a couple of extra journeys just to whack it into the next tier. Like head into Leeds on the bus to browse the shops and get lunch.
I don't understand how they could implement the savings / spending caps for contactless cards but couldn't do it at the same time for Oyster cards. It's insanity.
oyster does have spending caps, but not the more complicated calcuations
why? oyster is a stored value card
the barrier where you tap-out calculates and takes the money off the card instantly, and given the interaction time to get you through the barrier the computation is necessarily limited
whereas a contactless card is effectively being a pointer to a bank account that can be charged at a later date
for TfL there is a batch process at the end of the day which does that
The contactless cards are logged then charged centrally. Stored value cards are charged at the gate. Central charging allows more flexibility as you have more data to work with.
One advantage that an Oyster card has over a contactless payment card is that I still feel uncomfortable getting my wallet out and finding a payment card in a crowded tube station. Even using Apple/Google Pay requires me to get my phone out and again, I'm not always comfortable doing that. I appreciate I might be a little old fashioned about this but enough friends have been robbed in London over the years to make me a little paranoid. An Oyster Card, on the other hand, has sufficiently little value to me that I'm a lot more comfortable using it.
Despite the local critisicms, the tech implementation at TFL is really good. Oystercard was early, it's the same tech as all of public transport in the Netherlands (which started later but covers the whole country), but TFL quickly implemented support for all contactless bank cards while the Netherlands still in 2021 doesn't have that.
When I was living in the UK I only had an oystercard to lend it to friends and family visiting. Used Apple pay or my creditcard for all of my own travel.
I disagree, here in Vancouver our system is also from Cubic and it is terrible. Our transit corporation, Translink, had to switch all the buses to a single zone fare because they couldn't get the system to work over the cellular network. Not to mention that the cost to run the system every year is more than the total fare evasion on the entire system before it was implemented. So revenue is lower on that part of the system and they aren't saving any money. At rapid transit stations, the fare gates are not reliable and extremely slow.
It is shocking how much better the much older MTR system is in Hong Kong in comparison.
> I disagree, here in Vancouver our system is also from Cubic and it is terrible.
Okay, but you disagree based on a different system. I’m not sure what’s the disagreement about, GP was expressing their opinion about Oyster vs OV. Regardless, when I was working in London and areas from 2008 to 2012, I loved it. Used it on every form of transport and topped up everywhere, simple swipe and done.
OV card is also very nice. Swipe while getting on / off and done. The Oyster system felt a little bit more convenient with regards to the reader placement but OV is okay.
I'm far from an expert, but the OV-chipkaart was implemented 15 years ago. At the time 3G connectivity on buses and trams couldn't always be guaranteed, and the tech in the readers was also limited. To me it seems that executing all transactions on the card itself and balancing the books later makes sense given these limitations.
(That's not to say I don't have any criticisms on the system - I think the entire 'omchecken' procedure when switching between train companies could have been avoided and doesn't benefit passengers at all, and the system also doesn't allow for a fare cap at the day/week/month ticket level like Oyster.)
I lived in London for about 10 years and used the Oyster almost exclusively (with auto-topup enabled)
The biggest advantage I found was the latency between you tapping the card on the reader and the acknowledgement "beep" to let you through. Always seemed extremely responsive to the point where you get used to the motion of going through the barriers with one fell swoop.
When using anything else (e.g. credit cards/Apple Pay/whatever) the difference always seemed jarring, like maybe an extra 200ms-300ms longer for the thing to light green.
It might have gotten better since I was there though.
I use the “Express Travel Card” feature with Apple Pay now and it’s as fast as oyster was (in the wallet settings). I walk up to the gate with my phone in hand, locked, hold it over the reader and it’s super fast. I remember the slightly delay in the early days (plus verifying your ID with touch/face in advance of the gate) but I think it’s a solved issue now.
I can't find a source, but I recall reading that the staff oyster cards were significantly faster than the oyster cards provided to the public (~100ms rings a bell).
I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
I have heard something like this from colleagues, and I can confirm that staff Oyster cards are very fast. But I've always felt that regular Oyster cards are very fast too, so I don't notice much difference.
When the validator detects a staff Oyster card, it does check if the card is hotlisted (in case it was lost/stolen). But otherwise there's very little logic required.
In that context they are likely more of access badge than payment system. Thus far fewer steps to communicate and possibly even local copy of access database.
The old Oyster cards were really fast. But they had a security flaw, so they had to be replaced with newer ones that are slower to use :-( Both are still faster than a credit card.
Presto in Canada is built on similar technology, but no existing implementations were used because it's more expensive that way (thanks capitalism!)
For us, the tap takes half a second. If a queue forms, you'll be waiting awhile. It takes 2-3s if your card is in a purse, too.
Purse notwithstanding, it probably takes that long because the balance is not stored on the card. A round-trip to an external server is required.
Worse yet, if you try to use a freshly loaded Presto card on a terminal that is not internet-enabled (read: city buses), you cannot, because the offline terminal is only synced once a day. Don't even get me started...
IIRC Japan's FeliCa (Suica, PASMO, etc.) is much faster because it had more stringent timing requirements in the spec because of how many people they needed to be able to walk through a turnstile, which increases the cost of the associated hardware (the readers in the turnstiles/trains/buses, as well as in e.g. iPhone chips).
IIRC Presto does store the value on the card -- when you load value online, every bus/train/turnstile gets a batch data file of cards it needs to update the balance for, and checks every card that passes through it to see if yours is one of them, and then writes the updated balance to the card. But the slower scans are due to the choice of a different standardized transit pass format (one that allows for much slower -- IIRC, hundreds of ms -- reads/writes than the Japanese standard).
The balance is stored on the card, in fact the balance being stored on the card is something that people complain about constantly because there is a 24 hour period where the buses need to return to the depot to update and people hate that.
A simpler solution to all these ticketing systems is just to make public transport free. We already have taxes at all geography levels if we want it to be paid by a given city or region. People that don't use it benefit from it anyway by having less congestion in their private transport. Touristy cities already charge a fee per night to pay for the services tourists use. There's no point running these complex billing systems. Save that money to invest in the transport itself.
It's an interesting idea, though when you consider that a lot of the people who use public transport in London don't actually live in London, and some services extend outside of London, it does raise a lot of questions. And that's before you even get into the political factors.
Those challenges aren't necessarily insurmountable, but I imagine it would be a lot more complicated to do than it might first appear.
It's not possible if public transport is operated by company. I don't think it's good thing to government buy all public transport including profitable rails.
I don't think the idea of making public transport free (at the point of use) is entirely incompatible with a railway operated by the private sector. The company will need some form of income, but that can come in the form of fares, taxes, or a combination.
Operating a railway is not a very profitable business as it is. The National Rail network is transforming into Great British Railways. It's not complete nationalisation, but the government will have a lot more control. I get the feeling that the private train operating companies are generally welcoming of the changes, especially since it means the state will shoulder the financial risk.
While I think it's clear that some of the currently Oyster-only features could be migrated (e.g., you can have a rail discount card on an Oyster card, but clearly it merely requires a way to link an Oyster card to the "account" of the contactless card), others are more challenging, like free travel passes.
I suppose you could just issue EMV-compatible cards where you grant the holder free travel, though I'd expect this would be more complicated than the status-quo (both in terms of needing to register IDs in lists that aren't particularly long currently, and in terms of needing a much larger standard implemented).
The standard exists for this - it's called "Model 3" and is an implementation of Account Based Ticketing.
Essentially your card becomes a reference to an online account. When you tap your EMV card, it uses it as a reference to find your online account and see if you have any travel passes associated with it.
There is talk of introducing it on the London Underground. The system already allows customers to associate a card with an account online to track their journey history. But nothing seems to have moved on much in the last few years.
Readit News
We only have these cards due to historical quirk (quick contactless technology existed, but not in credit cards), and if we lose them, it’s another thing that we’re never getting back.
(I protested the removal of paper tickets from Sydney’s trains and busses, for what it’s worth…)
It wasn't that long ago Google or Apple were Saint. The future is Apple Pay, Cashless, Contactless Credit Card, Crypto.
It wasn't that long ago people that worries about privacy or freedom were over reacting, paranoid, pessimistic.
It wasn't that long ago having physical Cash, topping up your Oyster / Opal / Myki / Suica / Octopus / EZ-Link / Presto or any other Top Up Prepaid Card were dumb. The future is Apple Wallet.
How the tides have turned
IIRC you can’t have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese bank account.
We don’t want to lose this privacy because as mentioned. We’ll never get it back.
They're human, too. Often dumb, most often uninterested and lazy. And everyone gives up at some point.
In fact most of the decisions around ticketing were more about reducing costs and improving efficiency than reducing privacy (that was just the side effect) for example on buses people paying with cash were massively slowing down the boarding in busy areas, so they made pre-pay or opal only buses during peak hours hours in some areas to improve the on time running. Bus drivers also hated dealing with change and carrying money as well. They were already trying to phase out the use of cash on buses and I think covid accelerated that trend as they now had a great excuse to do so everywhere.
In fact even a few years ago there was already discussion of using CCTV and facial recognition to track people through stations and what they use, the idea being you could then pay for your trip the same way those Amazon supermarkets work as that would reduce the congestion at gates and allow better tracking of full trips as Opal data can't determine your exact route, only the parts where you tapped.
The reality is most people will complain far more about having to pay slightly higher ticket costs than for the loss of privacy, so it's a fairly easy decision for politicians to make and why Australia has so many sweeping surveillance powers.
>She said: "One of the biggest inequalities of modern tech and the widening gap is digital poverty, because there are people who are very reliant on their digital packages who take for granted their access to the internet. "There are still a lot of people paying in cash who could be flying under the radar. "If you do remove one-on-one payments and totally automate there's a group of people unable to use the service properly - or [have to] illegally - because they don't have a choice."
I am so happy to read this. Not everyday you have people caring about these sort of thing. Or May be tech is mostly dominated by Silicon Valley who dont sort of give a damn.
I still think Oyster card performs better than Visa PayWave / Master PayPass or Apple Pay / Google Pay. Although none of them are anywhere near as good as Suica Card in Japan.
However, a public transport system has to be for everyone. There are legal and political consequences to making it difficult or impossible for certain demographics to use public transport. There's also the fact that the most marginalised in our society are often incredibly reliant on public transport. That's why TfL and other public bodies have to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment for any policy change and take these things very seriously.
I absolutely agree. Except these private company were publicly advocating to abolish physical cash and top up card. Pushing their narrative towards a future which everything goes through Smartphone where the company have a strategic interest in doing so. While proclaiming themselves as the guardian of privacy and protector of their users.
This isn't the first time the subject of dropping Oyster card or any Top Up card payment in any part of the world has come up. Last time ( if I remember correctly it was 2016, roughly during the launch of Android Pay on Tfl or something like that, thinking about it now it might have been a PR piece ) there were people in the general public who really believe the future is cashless and all in Smartphone. And the general narrative at the time was dropping Oyster card some time in the future was inevitable because Tfl and other Transport companies around the world doesn't want the burden of running their own payment system in other to save cost. And if I remember correctly the answer Tfl gave at the time wasn't as clear cut as it is now.
So I am extremely happy to read a firm stand from Tfl on this issue.
Businesses look for efficiencies and that often means limiting their services to specific groups or requiring many prerequisites (either stated or implied). Government doesn't have that luxury and therefore has to be some level of inefficient. That doesn't stop government from offering modern internet-based services, it just means they have to keep the fallback process as well. For example, I can do my annual license plate renewal online with a credit card from the comfort of my home. If I don't have a credit card I can also go down to the ministry of transport office and pay in cash. A business could easily decide having physical offices all over the province is grossly expensive and make a switch to online payments only. Government doesn't (and shouldn't) have that option.
And it still works even if you root your phone or install LineageOS, which is also a big plus for me (it's why I can't use Google Pay).
He spent about 20 minutes one lunchtime trying to explain it to me, but it went straight over my head (I think 'alpha-beta pruning' was in there somewhere), but anyway it was all for naught as - hardly surprisingly - TfL had little appetite for software that would actually reduce their revenue.
I guess because they couldn’t work out a way for you to purchase a travel card on your contactless card, so this was the only way to allow regular commuters to use their contactless.
Anyway it was the reason I switched over from oyster to contactless. I realised I was getting ripped off as I would always use PAYG and _sometimes_ went over the caps.
I don't know what alpha-beta pruning is, and I'm not necessarily asserting it's massively complex, and I don't know anything about/haven't worked in the area beyond as a user - just pointing out it's not as simple as it might at first seem.
This happens live because you are shown the current balance (which needs this calculation) when completing journeys in some places, and can also check it from outside the system.
So you can see that a journey you just made cost say 10p even though obviously there are no fares that low, because 10p was the difference between the cheapest way to do your previous set of journeys, and the cheapest way to do all those journeys plus the new one.
† There are sometimes weird corner cases where e.g. travelling one extra stop and walking back is slightly cheaper but that's a different journey not an extra one.
It has a weird effect where I would take a couple of extra journeys just to whack it into the next tier. Like head into Leeds on the bus to browse the shops and get lunch.
why? oyster is a stored value card
the barrier where you tap-out calculates and takes the money off the card instantly, and given the interaction time to get you through the barrier the computation is necessarily limited
whereas a contactless card is effectively being a pointer to a bank account that can be charged at a later date
for TfL there is a batch process at the end of the day which does that
Once inside I'm conscious of potential pickpockets but no longer expect a mugging as a serious threat.
In contrast NYC and San Francisco's systems felt much more sketchy late at night, think it might've been the reduced staff presence
When I was living in the UK I only had an oystercard to lend it to friends and family visiting. Used Apple pay or my creditcard for all of my own travel.
It is shocking how much better the much older MTR system is in Hong Kong in comparison.
Okay, but you disagree based on a different system. I’m not sure what’s the disagreement about, GP was expressing their opinion about Oyster vs OV. Regardless, when I was working in London and areas from 2008 to 2012, I loved it. Used it on every form of transport and topped up everywhere, simple swipe and done.
OV card is also very nice. Swipe while getting on / off and done. The Oyster system felt a little bit more convenient with regards to the reader placement but OV is okay.
I'm far from an expert, but the OV-chipkaart was implemented 15 years ago. At the time 3G connectivity on buses and trams couldn't always be guaranteed, and the tech in the readers was also limited. To me it seems that executing all transactions on the card itself and balancing the books later makes sense given these limitations.
(That's not to say I don't have any criticisms on the system - I think the entire 'omchecken' procedure when switching between train companies could have been avoided and doesn't benefit passengers at all, and the system also doesn't allow for a fare cap at the day/week/month ticket level like Oyster.)
The biggest advantage I found was the latency between you tapping the card on the reader and the acknowledgement "beep" to let you through. Always seemed extremely responsive to the point where you get used to the motion of going through the barriers with one fell swoop.
When using anything else (e.g. credit cards/Apple Pay/whatever) the difference always seemed jarring, like maybe an extra 200ms-300ms longer for the thing to light green.
It might have gotten better since I was there though.
I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
When the validator detects a staff Oyster card, it does check if the card is hotlisted (in case it was lost/stolen). But otherwise there's very little logic required.
Presto in Canada is built on similar technology, but no existing implementations were used because it's more expensive that way (thanks capitalism!)
For us, the tap takes half a second. If a queue forms, you'll be waiting awhile. It takes 2-3s if your card is in a purse, too.
Purse notwithstanding, it probably takes that long because the balance is not stored on the card. A round-trip to an external server is required.
Worse yet, if you try to use a freshly loaded Presto card on a terminal that is not internet-enabled (read: city buses), you cannot, because the offline terminal is only synced once a day. Don't even get me started...
IIRC Presto does store the value on the card -- when you load value online, every bus/train/turnstile gets a batch data file of cards it needs to update the balance for, and checks every card that passes through it to see if yours is one of them, and then writes the updated balance to the card. But the slower scans are due to the choice of a different standardized transit pass format (one that allows for much slower -- IIRC, hundreds of ms -- reads/writes than the Japanese standard).
The balance is stored on the card, in fact the balance being stored on the card is something that people complain about constantly because there is a 24 hour period where the buses need to return to the depot to update and people hate that.
Those challenges aren't necessarily insurmountable, but I imagine it would be a lot more complicated to do than it might first appear.
Operating a railway is not a very profitable business as it is. The National Rail network is transforming into Great British Railways. It's not complete nationalisation, but the government will have a lot more control. I get the feeling that the private train operating companies are generally welcoming of the changes, especially since it means the state will shoulder the financial risk.
I suppose you could just issue EMV-compatible cards where you grant the holder free travel, though I'd expect this would be more complicated than the status-quo (both in terms of needing to register IDs in lists that aren't particularly long currently, and in terms of needing a much larger standard implemented).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key
Essentially your card becomes a reference to an online account. When you tap your EMV card, it uses it as a reference to find your online account and see if you have any travel passes associated with it.
There is talk of introducing it on the London Underground. The system already allows customers to associate a card with an account online to track their journey history. But nothing seems to have moved on much in the last few years.