08-02-2023, 02:43 PM
(08-01-2023, 03:26 PM)ac3r Wrote: You know...I'm surprised there aren't companies trying to do for transit payments what Amazon Go did for shopping. If there was a way to just board a bus or train with your card in your pocket/bag/whatever and it would deduct the appropriate fare or confirm the presence of a pass as you walked in the doors, that would be pretty nice. Of course it wouldn't fully be able to stop fare evasion, it could at least make people pay so long as they had their card on them even if they had no intent to be honest and pay. The way we handle it now just feels so archaic.
I believe Amazon Go stores effectively have "fare gates" where you have to scan the app before entering the store, so that they have payment information for you. Everything you take after then is automated, but you still had to tap/swipe/etc in.
Reading a fare card as you walked through the door would be challenging, the range on one of our fare cards is generally only considered to be a couple inches. The systems which scan inventory just by passing it through a frame use a much simpler read-only RFID technology, not one that requires bi-directional communication with the card being read. If we made our fare cards more like 407 transponders that would work, but those are bulky as they have a battery in them. No longer a card form-factor.
I can only think of two ways to implement what you suggest, that are realistic with current technology.
- Use facial recognition. GRT could have a facial database tied to accounts, and automatically recognize people as they boarded and deduct from their account balance. However, such a solution would be quite expensive, and unpopular for a number of (legitimate) privacy reasons. It also doesn't help with first-time riders.
- Use a smartphone app. The BLE (Bluetooth low energy) signal from a phone would be strong enough to be reliably picked up by a reader on the bus, and there wouldn't be the bulk associated with a dedicated device containing a battery. The app could run always-on in the background, similar to how Tesla implements their phone key technology. However, one could just turn off Bluetooth on their phone and ride for free. Also, not everyone has smartphones, and sometimes people run out of battery.
I think open payment systems, letting people just tap their credit/debit card, would the logical evolution. Anything else has too many issues.