Oyster scheme to offer a watch - Sky News (UK)
Oyster scheme to offer a watchThis could be the future of Presto here in the GTA. When we consider that transit is more than just getting from A to B, there is no limit to what innovations we can dream up.
Updated: Wednesday January 30 2008
Oyster scheme to offer a watch
The cashless payment scheme Oyster is to launch a new way to pay for London transport users, it is being reported.
As well as the Oyster cards, the Barclaycard-flavoured Oyster cards and a new Nokia/O2 phone trial, the scheme will extend the contactless payment to wristwatches.
The watch, which has built-in Oyster payment technology, has been trialled over the past 6 months by 500 members of Transport for London staff and is due to be rolled out later this year.
Oyster is apparently currently in discussions with several watch manufacturers, including Swatch, in order to decide who will be the official launch partner.
With the short range wireless technology used, wearers would just need to wave their watch near a contact point in order for the payment to be processed.
Labels: fares
posted by Andrae Griffith @ 2:52 a.m.
3 Comments:
I don't think most of those gimmicks are taking off here (London) very well. Everyone thinks the Barclay Oyster Card is cool, but no one's changing their bank for it. Similarly, I don't think you're going to find many City bankers trading in their Swiss watches for a cheap piece of rubbish that can be used as an Oyster Card. The Card is great and there's nothing wrong with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
While it's great to be innovative, we've already seen how the TTC has been used to showcase technology only to turn out to be a fiasco. The Scarborough Line was built as ICTS in order to show off UTDC's technology. We dismantled the perfectly working trolleybuses to put in CNG lemons. We're left with an incompatible CIS tracking system when GPS would have been more cost effective.
Maybe for a decade or two we should be more conservative and go back to tried-and-tested methods to improve transit, and then experiment with flashy technology.
I think that smart cards are a proven technology worldwide, and its not a reasonable comparison to ICTS (which seems to work very well if you actually put effort into it).
All I'm saying is that since we are doing smart cards, we might as well make them more attractive and more versatile than just a card that sits in the wallet.
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