England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking
Cutting-edge rail ticket technology to be trialled across the Midlands and North
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36878714
Yup, the UK once again creating a needlessly convoluted and harmful solution to an already solved problem.
I would laugh if I didn’t live here.
Classic UK
Here, have this sensible modernisation...... With a side of surveillance
Nah, it's surveillance with a side of sensible modernization.
Hey...we already have that without needing to use GPS. No really, we have that, without needing to use GPS. No. Really. We have two systems in fact.
We have m-tickets. Most major train, tram and bus companies in the UK have that. You can go onto your phone and buy a ticket without the need for GPS tracking. There's also Contactless on your phone. My city has something called TapTapCap/ToTo. On the buses, you can pay for your fare by tapping on a contactless terminal and it tracks how many journeys you make and caps the fare at the price of a day ticket if you make more than three Journeys. The Trams here have ToTo which is the same deal, but you have to tap on at the smart card terminal and tap off at your destination, as long as you do that and don't go to the Airport: you get the same deal.
That can easily be implemented. Fuck, mTickets have been implimented in Scotland. All you'd need to do is adapt the smartcard terminals, which use the technology as the bus passes, to do something like taptapcap. And before you say "oooh, we couldn't possibly put Smartcard totems on remote stations or Parliamentary stations", there are smart card terminals on every station on the West Highland Line. Yes, including the Fort William to Malaig section. There are Smartcard terminals on the Far North and Kyle of Lochalsh Lines. If Scotrail can do that at places like Dunrobin Castle, GBR can put Smartcard Terminals at Drigg, no GPS surveillance required.
We do the same in my part of the US where transit kinda sucks. You just tap a credit card (or phone w/ contactless payments) or physical card w/ chip on any bus or train and it charges the appropriate amount (i.e. day pass if you exceed some amount). It's not complicated, you just tap when you get on, and tap when you get off, and as long as you use the same payment method, it just works.
It's not complicated at all. At no point is GPS tracking needed, you just need to process the payment and link them together based on the unique identifier you're already using to process payments.
Fucking 1984 shit right here and everyone is gonna love it
Well, there's JKR, she wrote books pretty closely describing how powerful and arbitrarily unbalanced a computerized world will be, presented as magic. But she's a TERF, so nothing she wrote apparently has value. Or maybe she's a plagiarist, so again nothing she wrote apparently has value, except her plagiarism describes well current events and its sources don't.
I don't think she did that consciously, more like felt "something" in the air. But see the priorities of the public, in her not being a nice person and her having described the future correctly.
Also see the Matrix.
In general I think it's good to remember the initial reception of everything, if you were around then. Because in a few years power dynamic (hating on JKR for being TERF, and her using her fame to promote such views, - both these are that) always regulates the image of any work into something sterile and neutered.
We've had plenty of good art predicting today, but we've been taught after some time that it's capitalist, consumerist, non-original, empty, overrated and has asshole authors.
That direction of thought is wrong. Marcus Aurelius once made a bath for his wife - filled with her lover's blood ; doesn't seem to affect the value of his philosophy. Much of the classics in music was made by order for rich people for their entertainment and prestige. Nothing is life is truly original. And whether something is empty is not decided by the public opinion, it's decided by the reader.
So. We've had some preparation. Less than desired, and impeded by the enemy, as is the expectation always. It's not decided yet.
I didn't realise jkr meant that interpretation but its definitely something to consider.
I've always believed one must separate art from the artist lest all works are reduced to nothing given enough time. People love to dismiss modern works based on the authors opinions yet everyone through history is bad by modern standards. We must judge people by the context of their time. For example both Churchill and Disney where famously antisemitic yet both are now praised for their efforts against the Nazis.
Haven't read any Marcus Aurelius I'm reading Plato at the moment so I'll add it to the list.
Ah yes, I too remember the part of 1984 in which Big Brother improved Oceania’s outdated train ticketing system.
Why do you consider the UK's ticketing system outdated? There's oyster in/around London and QR codes everywhere else.
What are you missing, is location-based surveillance what would be needed to modernise it in your opinion?
I mean this is something our national train operator offers since years https://www.sbb.ch/en/travel-information/apps/sbb-mobile/easyride.html
I use this all the time, it's great.
Yeah only downside, at least on Android, don't know how it is on iOS, you need to activate all google location accuracy options in order to make it work. Just using the built-in GPS is not sufficient.
Why they can’t just have turnstiles at the major stations ? I mean that’s how most places work anyway? If someone stays on for a further stop outside the stiles it’s only a short leg anyway.
What’s the point?
The UK literally already does and also on trains your tickets get randomly checked too so even if your moving between small stations there is a chance you'll youll caught
Germany had something like this for a while which which was nice because it was useable in most major cities. Sadly the system has been discontinued: https://www.heise.de/news/Ticketdienst-Touch-Travel-stirbt-in-wenigen-Wochen-3344661.html
So they've created a dependency on your phone's location service being always on for what reason, exactly?
Why is this not needed anywhere else that contactless payment for transit services has been successfully implemented?
One of them actually being London. They had contactless pay with Google pay there for years already, without location service. You tab to go on and tab when you exit the metro