[LINK] more myki pain

[Tom Worthington]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> ... simple solution - store and forward ... myki probably relies too
> much on real-time connectivity  ...
> 
> http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/new-tram-plan-could-get-myki-back-on-track-20100409-rysb.html

No. According to the article in the Age, the problem is that the 
Melbourne fare structure is distance based. So the commuter has to swipe 
their card at both the beginning and end of the journey. The limited 
number of readers on trams slows down exiting. Making the readers faster 
would not help much.

The solution suggested in the article is to not require swipe on exit
for trams. Passengers would be charged the minimum fare (at present they 
would be charged the maxiumim fare if they failed to swipe). So for 
trams there would be effectively be one flat fare.

A simpler solution would be to remove all the zones, as with Instabul's 
Akbil: <http://www.tomw.net.au/travel/istanbul.shtml#akbil>.
Instabul uses contact based travel tokens which must be pressed into the 
reader. In theory this should be slower than Miki's contact-less 
readers, but because these are part of a well thought out system it can 
cope with many times the number of commuters in Melbourne.

Deutsche Bahn (DB) are trialling an electronic ticketing system which
uses mobile phones and Near Field Communications (NFC). This reverses
the arrangement used for Miki: the smart card is attached to the train
and the card reader is in the passenger's mobile phone:
<http://www.gi-de.com/portal/page?_pageid=44,137589&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890