The cost to upgrade public transport ticketing system to contactless - how much?

243 million a year is quite a lot of money but complex IT systems are very expensive.

Ah, my mistake!

It was always a commercial decision. Technologically there is no barrier, as Leap cards and phone-pay/contactless cards use the exact same technology. This is not by coincidence: much of the development of the contactless payment system is based on work done on behalf of Transport for London to allow debit-card ticketing for the London 2012 Olympics. Phone payment is nothing more than an implementation of the same contactless system: the reason there's no €50 limit on your Google/Apple Pay is because a big tech company has made an agreement with the credit card companies to take on more of the fraud risk: they have not changed any of the actual technology.

There's one big problem with using credit/debit cards on transport... their purchase cycles can be very long, and can require a live connection to the "bank" (I say "bank" as I don't want to drag you into the tangled web of how card payments actually work). Leap and other wallet systems on the other hand are offline and near-real-time: when you tap, the card balance is updated and stored on the card, and the terminal stores the record of the transaction. The terminal sends that transaction record to the backend later, within about 1 minute, but usually quicker than that. The key thing is that there's no need for your leap card or the terminal to enter into a live exchange with any backend server. The time needed to process a passenger is the 1 second needed to read and update the wallet information stored on your card. Transaction time is essential for transport ticketing: Melbourne tried to roll their own system and it was so slow they ended up having to make the core of the tram network completely free to use becuase asking passengers to tap on was creating long boarding delays.

At its fastest, contactless card payment is actually not much slower than the Leap card (your €50 of tappable purchases is very similar to the wallet credit on a Leap card, so it doesn't need the lenghty transaction approval process), so you'd think it'd be just a matter of allowing tap to pay on the buses, using the exact same stuff as at a coffee shop… and that's how I'm sure this will be framed in the shouty press when the cost of the project is discussed…

But it really is not as simple as that. First problem that arises is when you want to do more than just let customers buy a fixed price ticket from the bus driver (e.g. Luas zonal fares, system-wide fare capping) , and the second is how you deal with customers who have exceeded their tap limit. Both of those situations need a much more complex backend IT system that has to comply with the very strict security standards of the payment card industry. That all adds cost.

Answer to 1 is that you pre-charge the customer for a day ticket, then at the end of the day, refund part of that if they don't make enough journeys.. but you need to not charge again when the passenger taps off, which means you need to have a pretty close to real-time record of transactions. That's not how your typical merchant terminal works.

To implement all of this and then maintain it for a system with a couple of hundred million transactions a year (the whole country), €24 million doesn't sound that bad.

Is going cashless stuck waiting on this to complete, and if so, why? We could go cashless tomorrow.

The current ticketing machines cannot handle card payments, so no, we couldn't.

Not going to fly. Needs to be a way for people who do not have a leap card to pay.

There is: go buy a bloody leap card. I don't understand the weakness of this decision. The amount of time and effort wasted handling cash is extraordinary. It should have been dropped three months after the leap card was first introduced.

Their Leap equivalent has huge, huge problems so I don't want them copying that bit, thanks.

Rather hard to actually purchase

Giant credit needed to take any heavy rail trip

Refund for an expired card needs you to visit a TVM to 'cancel' the card after applying for the refund online, so if you leave the country, they keep your money.

We'd need to get rid of all the remaining single door buses to go to tag-off also but I don't expect that will ever happen - tag off, not shifting the old single doors.

Try being serious, please.

What about tourists?

And what about people not from Dublin who have no need for a Leap card except when they're in Dublin?

Or just people who have forgotten their Leap card as a poster above mentioned.

To be fair, and in response to the other person who had a negative side to the system, I was just there for the week but travelled around the country and within cities with the family. I may only have registered the cards to get the discounts available for kids.

The most painless travel I've encountered in any country.

The public transport system is not built entirely for you and your specific usage patterns. Thankfully.

Excluding significant portions of the user base because you're OK with it isn't going to happen, no matter how many times you gripe about it.

I think - but again, limited use cases here - that the dutch system works with international Visa Debit cards which would be most?

I amn't sure how flat fares work when you are trying to encompass all public travel types and locations.

Tourism was the reason TfL started the contactless card ticketing project in London, and it's the same reason TFI want to do it now.

Leap is great for residents, but for someone spending a couple of days in the country, paying a fiver for the card then putting money on it that you'll never get back is a bad deal, so they end up using cash or trying to buy tickets in person with a card.

It costs a lot of money to deal with this, so the idea is to cut out the middleman and let visitors use the card (or phone in the case of Americans, many of whom don't get contactless cards from their banks) that they already have on them.

One great thing about Leap is that it is a nationwide system: that means when contactless card payment is added to it, it will become usable nationwide. That might encourage tourists to use more public transport, which in turn could make improved PT a viable proposition in some parts of the country.

After the upgrade is finished will there be no equivalent of a prepaid public transport card that can be bought and topped up using cash?

Yeah, there was some confusion as to whether it would work, but it did indeed. I checked my Revolut earlier to double check I wasn't dreaming it! The rest of our group were very impressed by it. It is a strange concept hopping on an IC train for nearly two hours with nothing to show for it. But it worked great.

Yes, the short fare on the bus should be dropped. A second flat fare reader should also be installed at the drivers machine on the left as you enter to really increase the flow of people boarding. Sometimes the read can be bad or people wave their card like a wand, which won't work. With the rear door for exiting, that is as good as you are going to get for loading and unloading a double deck city bus.

Do you mean Leap for 'can't get the money back'? You can request a refund to any IBAN account. Done it whenever I've had to change Taxsaver; and when getting rid of my original card and going Taxsaver back in the day.

Just use an expired Taxsaver as a normal Leap now, which did cause trouble on a barrier once where it tried to read the old ticket first

less than 10% of all journeys on Dublin bus are paid for using cash. If you were running this service you'd be thinking that implmenting all that new technology and cost just to facilitate such a small number of customers is a bad business decission.

It's still the right thing to do but you have to agree that the Leap card and its adopotion has been really good.

Also cash fares are much more expensive than leap so will the future % of tap payments be still very low as you get cheaper fares using leap?

All online. Can refund to any SEPA account.