Dutch Transport Card Broken

[Harald Koch]

Crawford Nathan-HMGT87 wrote:
> Why require contactless in the first place?
>
> Is swiping one's card, credit-card style too difficult for the average
> user?

As compared to slapping your wallet on the reader? yes.

I swipe my Visa / debit / Tim Horton's cards regularly. With the 
plethora of bad reader technology out there, no matter how practiced I 
am it sometimes takes 2-3 tries to get a good read. Heck, sales clerks 
who swipe hundreds of times per day sometimes have trouble. And that's 
with a relatively easy to read magnetic stripe...

GO Transit here in Toronto ran a pilot program with contactless 
stored-value fare cards several years ago, which worked quite well; I'm 
sure technology details are available via Google. Alas, the project got 
squashed by a political movement for a Greater Toronto Area fare card 
project (which still hasn't gone anywhere 5-6 years later...).

-- 
Harald



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