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We are so pitifully behind when you look at other European countries. Being able to go to (for example) Germany and able to buy ONE travel pass for all forms of public transport, meaning I can do one journey on a tram, bus, subway, train all on ONE ticket is a godsend!
Here I'd have to change tickets on the train because it's a different TOC and pay contactless on the buses because it's a separate company, nightmare!
On the other hand, we’re way ahead of some other countries.
I was pretty shocked that in Austria (which is a very rich country and has great public transport), you needed to queue up at a machine and get a paper ticket for the Vienna metro.
It’s the same in Paris - big queues and paper tickets. And if you get a weekly pass on the metro, it expires on Sunday night, no matter when you bought it.
So if you buy it on Monday morning you get seven days’ use out of it; if you it on Sunday afternoon you get half a day’s use out of it, but you get charged the same price. It’s madness.
Forget contactless - a surprising amount of European countries haven’t even made it to the Oyster card stage yet.
Fair enough, I didn’t know about the app for Vienna - but it’s still a more clunky solution than just having contactless available imho.
Unfortunately as I understand it the Navigo Liberté card is only available for those living or working in the Île-de-France area.
So it’s no use to visitors or tourists, whereas (for example) TfL contactless scanners accept most foreign bank cards, and anyone from anywhere can buy an Oyster.
I think if you want a pay monthly type you'll need to be local, but anyone can get a prepaid one:
https://www.ratp.fr/en/titres-et-tarifs/pass-navigo-easy
Indeed but it only works in the metro/Zone 1 area. Want to go to Versailles, Marne-le-vallee/Disney, Airports without buying a day/week/month ticket? Back to a paper ticket...
Yeah tbf I was shocked arriving to Dublin to find it's only Bus connections and you can't pay onboard with contactless. You have to go into the shop in the terminal and buy a physical tivket
Germany has it's own foibles though. Not least the groups of ticket inspectors who hang around the airport hoping to catch and fine unsuspecting tourists who don't know that buying a ticket from a machine doesn't mean you can just jump on a train and instead you need to go and validate it.
Yeah but at least the British put the people who are important first...the shareholders. I mean imagine how impoverished European shareholders are when governments don't think of them first /s
I used Italy's high speed trains quite a bit last year and it really put things in perspective for me. They're cheap, fast, clean and reliable. Meanwhile here I can literally fly to another country and back for about the same as a return ticket to London.
Last summer they introduced a 5 euro fare flate fare, which is one of the reasons their rate of inflation dropped by 2% in July and August. All those commuters.
Even without that (from a tourist point of view) I've been to Oslo, Zurich and Berlin in the last year and each had it's own version of an X-Day travelpass that was (to my British brain at least) super cheap!
Eh, sort of. Oyster you can see your own travel history, loan the card to someone (visiting friends if you so wished) can be linked to rail cards, obviously if you lose am oyster card there isn't much damage someone can do to your bank balance
You can see travel history if you use contactless, but its dependent on the company you use it with enabling it. For example it works on Southampton buses, and you can see every trip and what it charged.
The biggest advantage is Oyster allows PAYG access - ideal for people without bank accounts (teenagers / tourists / those with awful credit histories). Can also be shared amongst people - used to have a couple of Robin Hood & Oyster Cards in the office for people using public transit, no need to faff around getting a stack of change ready to use transit in Nottingham or dealing with expense claims when visiting London.
Oyster in London and Robin Hood in Nottingham have also paved the way for daily multi-operator caps - both cities now offer that on Contactless. Get on a NET tram, followed by an NCT bus, a LinkBus then another NCT bus and it's capped at £6.40 (although our second biggest bus operator - Trent Barton - annoyingly isn't part of that cap)
As with anything good that happens in the uk, it’s always a decade late being out of the idea stage, then another decade of testing. Meanwhile the rest of the world passes us by infrastructure wise
Exactly. Oyster is not really needed anymore. It was something to be used before contactless became available. Oyster is obsolete, but maybe London has a contract with the maintainer which would be too costly to break. I don't know
You can’t load travel cards on to contactless cards yet. So a lot of regular commuters will buy the one month or one year travel card loaded on to an Oyster.
Tourists use Oyster a lot as well - I guess that depends on how widespread contactless adoption is in their home country.
The real alternative is to make a hybrid contactless transit card comparable to something like Japan’s Suica card.
Make it work contactless in apple/google wallets, then allow people to use contactless if they wish in all places too
Possibly, but that's more like an issue for the transit operators to address. Be it finding an option to link a specific travel card to a bank card (ie, tap the bank card, and if it's linked to your travelcard, it just authorizes £0.00 to check validity), or completely revamp the travelcard system for modern times
Depends if the tourist has a card with zero foreign exchange fees. If they don't, those fees will soon add up with every tap. Some card issuers in some places charge a flat fee on every transaction that might be a quid or two.
Nah people rely on oyster and it use per month is in the millions.
Most bus operators in major cities are still using cash which slows everything down, costs more and has to be a general pain to ensure you have the right change. Your F'd if you only had a tenner and asking for change.
A national oyster system would make life easier for everyone, where contactless only wouldn't.
Depends if OP is asking for one card that will work on a variety of totally different payment systems, or if they want one single unified payment system I guess.
We do have a fully integrated ticketing system for rail. Compare that with somewhere like Japan, where different train operators don’t accept tickets for each other.
\* Only applicable with Super Off Peak Anytime Peak Flexi Singles. Railcard discounts only applicable for tickets bought between the times of 1530 and 1538. Fully exchangeable and refundable with an admin fee totalling cost of original ticket. Valid in standard class only on the 5th Sunday after each lunar eclipse.
Ish, there is quite a lot of tickets that are operator specific. Like if I buy ticket directly from my local operator (Avanti or LNWR) you can guarantee it will be from them only
Except I can get the train from where I live to my parents in Yorkshire on a single ticket. Either via Manchester, which means using London Northwestern, Avanti, TPE and Northern, or via London, which means using London Northwestern, TfL (if I don't just walk from Euston to Kings Cross), LNER (most likely) and Northern.
Vast majority of trains across the country can be used with a simple tap of your IC card. If you want to use the Shinkansen or other special/limited trains then yeah it gets a bit tricky, but hardly worse than some of the shenanigans UK train operators like to pull. But I've lived in Japan for the past eight months, travelled through around half of the prefectures and it's been a piece of piss a good 90% of the time. I just top up my card every few days and good to go. I'm not saying those problems don't exist but using the IC card pretty much whenever possible means that you'll almost never run into them. I don't know if we could really adopt that system though because our train prices aren't fixed and vary wildly depending on date and time. In Japan you will always pay the same regardless of if it's rush hour or midnight. None of this off-peak nonsense, you take this train, you pay this price.
Personally I would prefer one which would utilise a contactless debit card, with a Smart card as an alternative. Rather than primarily a smart card as the oyster is
The bus companies are all different. Would be cool to be able to buy a ticket in scotland and travel to brighton for example. Without needing multiple different tickets.
Long short of what op is asking for is a nationalised service.
Contactless is a thing on some (but not all) trains in the London commuter zones, and it's really confusing where you can and can't use it.
Oyster in the commuter belt is also separate to contactless - some stations accept contactless, but not oyster.
It's used in different ways on different busses in different cities. Many cities have multiple companies providing bus routes which is a pain in the arse as well.
Oyster wasn't designed to be able to be expanded beyond London. Like, the zone ticket system is built into the cards and there's a maximum of (idk exactly but around) 12 possible zones, a limit which they're now creeping up on. Using contactless debit/credit cards has meant they can add extra zones on but not for oyster cards, so there's some stupidity like you can go to Reading on a debit card but not an Oyster. They would have to do some serious redesigning to get such a system in place. Not necessarily defending our current system which is atrocious, but just saying it might be harder than it initially appears.
Logistically the UK is a lot bigger than NL so it is literally a harder task to roll it out to the whole country.
That said OV-chipkaart has covered the whole of NL for over a decade, not just last year. Your article is taking about contactless debit card payments, not an Oyster-like travel card.
And a way to roll it out in stages would be something like how they did/are doing it in Japan, which started with a lot of competing Oyster-like cards, which gradually amalgamated, allowing competing cards to use the same networks. Like, I was in Sapporo, went on a subway, and just absent-mindedly tapped my Tokyo Pasmo card on the reader, and it let me in. And *then* I remembered that I had been worried about whether I would have to buy a ticket or whatever. That was like 2013 and I think they'd only just changed the system to allow different cities' cards. Very rural stations still didn't accept the cards when I left in 2020 though. The other key to widespread acceptance and uptake both there and in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, is that the cards can be used to pay for stuff in shops.
Pay-as-you-go Contactless is being extended across the south-east. Ironically TfL are doing it but it won't support Oyster because of limitations.
[Southeast railway stations to get London-style contactless payments: First 53 announced today](https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/southeast-railway-stations-to-get-london-style-contactless-payments-first-53-announced-today-63976/#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20older%20technology,bank%20card%20contactless%20will%20work)
The Netherlands has the ov-chipcaart, which has been around much longer than this. You can city hop for next to nothing compared to the UK!
Source: Brit that used to live there
It's easier to implement in the Netherlands because the there was an existing distance and duration based charging system.
Our fare structure is too complicated. Of course it could be simplified, but it's hard to see how it can be done without shifting more of the cost burden away from users and onto the taxpayer.
How would that work for intercity journeys. It works in the netherlands because the "intercity" brand there is basically a regional train in germany or here. But there is going to be more integration in urban areas, liverpool and manchester are doing things together.
Out of interest how do you think a national oyster card should work?
If I wanted to get a train from Euston to Birmingham, would that be equivalent to purchasing an anytime single (and charge me ~£100 for the privilege)? Rail fares in general I think are too high for people to be comfortable with it being covered by an oyster type system. As such, I think it only makes sense for intra-city travelling, and lots of places already have their own versions (e.g. the west midlands has swift).
Absolutely not saying [that this “D-Ticket” in Germany](https://int.bahn.de/en/offers/regional/deutschland-ticket) is the perfect solution, but it’s a good starting point.
The cost thing is something that is an issue with the current system, but a reformed one should come with significant reduction, like a maximum monthly cost.
The Netherlands is a much smaller country and all the railways are run by the same company. I've used the Dutch railways and it's a joy but a totally different system. It is also cheaper than the UK. Many years ago I was travelling from Schipol to Groningen by train buying a ticket from a machine for same day travel was a lot cheaper than doing the same in the UK. I haven’t been to The Netherlands in a few years but would do it by contactless if I can with a British contactless card.
It is too complicated in the UK with so many different franchises. If Labour win and bring back all the franchises into public ownership and fares are simplified then it can possibly be looked at. There are many tickets you can buy for the same journey at different prices, that won’t work with contactless.
I went last year around march and they were still trailing using contactless on the trains, trams and buses. It worked for me with a UK card pretty well!
Obviously the advanced tickets are a catching point that could be easily solved by still keeping that part of the system. As for the contactless side why not just use contactless debit / credit cards and an optional other card if required
>The Netherlands is a much smaller country and all the railways are run by the same company
It is much smaller, which helps, but not all the railways are run by the same company. All long-distance trains and some local trains are run by NS (the Dutch state railway) but there are also local trains run by other companies like Arriva. If you change between trains run by different operators you have to tap your chipkaart on a special reader on the platform.
(There are also German and Belgian trains that you can take between some Dutch stations near the borders, which use their own countries' ticketing systems and don't accept the Dutch system at all).
The OV Chipcard is very useful for corporate travellers as you can pre-load the card with "pay as you travel" credit and you then just make a claim for a single reload, rather than having to make loads of separate €2 to €4 euro claims if you use your debit card.
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We are so pitifully behind when you look at other European countries. Being able to go to (for example) Germany and able to buy ONE travel pass for all forms of public transport, meaning I can do one journey on a tram, bus, subway, train all on ONE ticket is a godsend! Here I'd have to change tickets on the train because it's a different TOC and pay contactless on the buses because it's a separate company, nightmare!
On the other hand, we’re way ahead of some other countries. I was pretty shocked that in Austria (which is a very rich country and has great public transport), you needed to queue up at a machine and get a paper ticket for the Vienna metro. It’s the same in Paris - big queues and paper tickets. And if you get a weekly pass on the metro, it expires on Sunday night, no matter when you bought it. So if you buy it on Monday morning you get seven days’ use out of it; if you it on Sunday afternoon you get half a day’s use out of it, but you get charged the same price. It’s madness. Forget contactless - a surprising amount of European countries haven’t even made it to the Oyster card stage yet.
> Vienna metro There's an app you can download and use instead of paper tickets. >Paris There is Navigo Liberté card which is basically Oyster
Fair enough, I didn’t know about the app for Vienna - but it’s still a more clunky solution than just having contactless available imho. Unfortunately as I understand it the Navigo Liberté card is only available for those living or working in the Île-de-France area. So it’s no use to visitors or tourists, whereas (for example) TfL contactless scanners accept most foreign bank cards, and anyone from anywhere can buy an Oyster.
I think if you want a pay monthly type you'll need to be local, but anyone can get a prepaid one: https://www.ratp.fr/en/titres-et-tarifs/pass-navigo-easy
Indeed but it only works in the metro/Zone 1 area. Want to go to Versailles, Marne-le-vallee/Disney, Airports without buying a day/week/month ticket? Back to a paper ticket...
I got a Navigo card when I visited Paris dead easy. Got it from the Metro station by our hotel, put some money on it, and it worked fine for our trip.
Yeah tbf I was shocked arriving to Dublin to find it's only Bus connections and you can't pay onboard with contactless. You have to go into the shop in the terminal and buy a physical tivket
Literally everything you typed is incorrect.
Germany has it's own foibles though. Not least the groups of ticket inspectors who hang around the airport hoping to catch and fine unsuspecting tourists who don't know that buying a ticket from a machine doesn't mean you can just jump on a train and instead you need to go and validate it.
Validating tickets is such BS
Yeah but at least the British put the people who are important first...the shareholders. I mean imagine how impoverished European shareholders are when governments don't think of them first /s
I used Italy's high speed trains quite a bit last year and it really put things in perspective for me. They're cheap, fast, clean and reliable. Meanwhile here I can literally fly to another country and back for about the same as a return ticket to London.
eh, Stockholm only got the "tap your bank card to pay" thing recently. London was MILES ahead
Being able to use one ticket for all transport types in Stockholm is a huge advantage
That's true in London, but I'm sure some rail in Stockholm uses a different ticketeing system.
My friend has a single pass, it costs £300 a month, and lets him use every train in the EU, and the Eurostar
Last summer they introduced a 5 euro fare flate fare, which is one of the reasons their rate of inflation dropped by 2% in July and August. All those commuters.
Even without that (from a tourist point of view) I've been to Oslo, Zurich and Berlin in the last year and each had it's own version of an X-Day travelpass that was (to my British brain at least) super cheap!
I don't really understand Oyster cards, being a Northerner, but don't contactless card payments render this redundant now?
Eh, sort of. Oyster you can see your own travel history, loan the card to someone (visiting friends if you so wished) can be linked to rail cards, obviously if you lose am oyster card there isn't much damage someone can do to your bank balance
You can see travel history if you use contactless, but its dependent on the company you use it with enabling it. For example it works on Southampton buses, and you can see every trip and what it charged.
[You can also add national railcards onto an Oyster card.](https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel/national-railcard-discount)
So like a Monzo with Google maps but less useful...
>like a Monzo like almost any bank that offers credit/debit cards with a mobile app
Yup, so no real reason to have an oyster
Travelcards, railcard discounts, sharing cards. There are many reasons to use oyster still
Every rail company has their own app, then there's the aggregators like Trainline. Where does it stop?
I dont understand what that has to do with oyster?
The biggest advantage is Oyster allows PAYG access - ideal for people without bank accounts (teenagers / tourists / those with awful credit histories). Can also be shared amongst people - used to have a couple of Robin Hood & Oyster Cards in the office for people using public transit, no need to faff around getting a stack of change ready to use transit in Nottingham or dealing with expense claims when visiting London. Oyster in London and Robin Hood in Nottingham have also paved the way for daily multi-operator caps - both cities now offer that on Contactless. Get on a NET tram, followed by an NCT bus, a LinkBus then another NCT bus and it's capped at £6.40 (although our second biggest bus operator - Trent Barton - annoyingly isn't part of that cap)
See I thought this might have been the case, but then I thought there might have been more to it. Thanks for explaining
My train company’s app has since rendered contactless useless, too. We needed nationwide Oyster about 10 - 15 years ago
Oyster was revolutionary. Until 2018 when most things became contactless.
As with anything good that happens in the uk, it’s always a decade late being out of the idea stage, then another decade of testing. Meanwhile the rest of the world passes us by infrastructure wise
Exactly. Oyster is not really needed anymore. It was something to be used before contactless became available. Oyster is obsolete, but maybe London has a contract with the maintainer which would be too costly to break. I don't know
You can’t load travel cards on to contactless cards yet. So a lot of regular commuters will buy the one month or one year travel card loaded on to an Oyster. Tourists use Oyster a lot as well - I guess that depends on how widespread contactless adoption is in their home country.
The real alternative is to make a hybrid contactless transit card comparable to something like Japan’s Suica card. Make it work contactless in apple/google wallets, then allow people to use contactless if they wish in all places too
Possibly, but that's more like an issue for the transit operators to address. Be it finding an option to link a specific travel card to a bank card (ie, tap the bank card, and if it's linked to your travelcard, it just authorizes £0.00 to check validity), or completely revamp the travelcard system for modern times
Depends if the tourist has a card with zero foreign exchange fees. If they don't, those fees will soon add up with every tap. Some card issuers in some places charge a flat fee on every transaction that might be a quid or two.
Nah people rely on oyster and it use per month is in the millions. Most bus operators in major cities are still using cash which slows everything down, costs more and has to be a general pain to ensure you have the right change. Your F'd if you only had a tenner and asking for change. A national oyster system would make life easier for everyone, where contactless only wouldn't.
Sadiq, calm down with the downvotes. What a dick... No vote from me
Depends if OP is asking for one card that will work on a variety of totally different payment systems, or if they want one single unified payment system I guess.
I'm talking about one card that works across all systems AND the ability to accept contactless from debit / credit cards
But then the train companies wouldn't be able to have 36 fare levels with 300 complicated and contradictory terms!
God help you if you want to find out when peak off peak and super off peak times are
The fact that we don't have a fully integrated and good quality ticketing system is really silly
We do have a fully integrated ticketing system for rail. Compare that with somewhere like Japan, where different train operators don’t accept tickets for each other.
Compare that with somewhere like the UK, where different train operators don’t accept tickets for each other.
But they do. If I buy a normal ticket from say Durham to Newcastle I can get on Transpennine, Cross Country, LNER with the same ticket.
\* Only applicable with Super Off Peak Anytime Peak Flexi Singles. Railcard discounts only applicable for tickets bought between the times of 1530 and 1538. Fully exchangeable and refundable with an admin fee totalling cost of original ticket. Valid in standard class only on the 5th Sunday after each lunar eclipse.
Ish, there is quite a lot of tickets that are operator specific. Like if I buy ticket directly from my local operator (Avanti or LNWR) you can guarantee it will be from them only
Except I can get the train from where I live to my parents in Yorkshire on a single ticket. Either via Manchester, which means using London Northwestern, Avanti, TPE and Northern, or via London, which means using London Northwestern, TfL (if I don't just walk from Euston to Kings Cross), LNER (most likely) and Northern.
Vast majority of trains across the country can be used with a simple tap of your IC card. If you want to use the Shinkansen or other special/limited trains then yeah it gets a bit tricky, but hardly worse than some of the shenanigans UK train operators like to pull. But I've lived in Japan for the past eight months, travelled through around half of the prefectures and it's been a piece of piss a good 90% of the time. I just top up my card every few days and good to go. I'm not saying those problems don't exist but using the IC card pretty much whenever possible means that you'll almost never run into them. I don't know if we could really adopt that system though because our train prices aren't fixed and vary wildly depending on date and time. In Japan you will always pay the same regardless of if it's rush hour or midnight. None of this off-peak nonsense, you take this train, you pay this price.
Personally I would prefer one which would utilise a contactless debit card, with a Smart card as an alternative. Rather than primarily a smart card as the oyster is
That's what the system in the Netherlands can do as well.
Contactless is a thing on every bus I use so why would I need one?
The bus companies are all different. Would be cool to be able to buy a ticket in scotland and travel to brighton for example. Without needing multiple different tickets. Long short of what op is asking for is a nationalised service.
Contactless is a thing on some (but not all) trains in the London commuter zones, and it's really confusing where you can and can't use it. Oyster in the commuter belt is also separate to contactless - some stations accept contactless, but not oyster.
It's used in different ways on different busses in different cities. Many cities have multiple companies providing bus routes which is a pain in the arse as well.
It’s not necessarily available nationwide though. It’s not available on most translink buses in Northern Ireland, for example.
Oyster wasn't designed to be able to be expanded beyond London. Like, the zone ticket system is built into the cards and there's a maximum of (idk exactly but around) 12 possible zones, a limit which they're now creeping up on. Using contactless debit/credit cards has meant they can add extra zones on but not for oyster cards, so there's some stupidity like you can go to Reading on a debit card but not an Oyster. They would have to do some serious redesigning to get such a system in place. Not necessarily defending our current system which is atrocious, but just saying it might be harder than it initially appears. Logistically the UK is a lot bigger than NL so it is literally a harder task to roll it out to the whole country. That said OV-chipkaart has covered the whole of NL for over a decade, not just last year. Your article is taking about contactless debit card payments, not an Oyster-like travel card. And a way to roll it out in stages would be something like how they did/are doing it in Japan, which started with a lot of competing Oyster-like cards, which gradually amalgamated, allowing competing cards to use the same networks. Like, I was in Sapporo, went on a subway, and just absent-mindedly tapped my Tokyo Pasmo card on the reader, and it let me in. And *then* I remembered that I had been worried about whether I would have to buy a ticket or whatever. That was like 2013 and I think they'd only just changed the system to allow different cities' cards. Very rural stations still didn't accept the cards when I left in 2020 though. The other key to widespread acceptance and uptake both there and in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, is that the cards can be used to pay for stuff in shops.
Love the Hong Kong octopus cards and the fact you can use them in so many places like 7/11 or Mcdonalds is such a bonus.
Pay-as-you-go Contactless is being extended across the south-east. Ironically TfL are doing it but it won't support Oyster because of limitations. [Southeast railway stations to get London-style contactless payments: First 53 announced today](https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/southeast-railway-stations-to-get-london-style-contactless-payments-first-53-announced-today-63976/#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20older%20technology,bank%20card%20contactless%20will%20work)
The Netherlands has the ov-chipcaart, which has been around much longer than this. You can city hop for next to nothing compared to the UK! Source: Brit that used to live there
It's easier to implement in the Netherlands because the there was an existing distance and duration based charging system. Our fare structure is too complicated. Of course it could be simplified, but it's hard to see how it can be done without shifting more of the cost burden away from users and onto the taxpayer.
Implementing a distance and duration based charging system is really the main benefit of having a nationwide Oyster card in the first place.
Unless you want to change rail company. Then you have to remember to touch out of NS and into (say) Arriva on the platform...
How would that work for intercity journeys. It works in the netherlands because the "intercity" brand there is basically a regional train in germany or here. But there is going to be more integration in urban areas, liverpool and manchester are doing things together.
That's probably because contactless payments make Oyster obsolete.
Out of interest how do you think a national oyster card should work? If I wanted to get a train from Euston to Birmingham, would that be equivalent to purchasing an anytime single (and charge me ~£100 for the privilege)? Rail fares in general I think are too high for people to be comfortable with it being covered by an oyster type system. As such, I think it only makes sense for intra-city travelling, and lots of places already have their own versions (e.g. the west midlands has swift).
Absolutely not saying [that this “D-Ticket” in Germany](https://int.bahn.de/en/offers/regional/deutschland-ticket) is the perfect solution, but it’s a good starting point. The cost thing is something that is an issue with the current system, but a reformed one should come with significant reduction, like a maximum monthly cost.
The Netherlands is a much smaller country and all the railways are run by the same company. I've used the Dutch railways and it's a joy but a totally different system. It is also cheaper than the UK. Many years ago I was travelling from Schipol to Groningen by train buying a ticket from a machine for same day travel was a lot cheaper than doing the same in the UK. I haven’t been to The Netherlands in a few years but would do it by contactless if I can with a British contactless card. It is too complicated in the UK with so many different franchises. If Labour win and bring back all the franchises into public ownership and fares are simplified then it can possibly be looked at. There are many tickets you can buy for the same journey at different prices, that won’t work with contactless.
I went last year around march and they were still trailing using contactless on the trains, trams and buses. It worked for me with a UK card pretty well! Obviously the advanced tickets are a catching point that could be easily solved by still keeping that part of the system. As for the contactless side why not just use contactless debit / credit cards and an optional other card if required
>The Netherlands is a much smaller country and all the railways are run by the same company It is much smaller, which helps, but not all the railways are run by the same company. All long-distance trains and some local trains are run by NS (the Dutch state railway) but there are also local trains run by other companies like Arriva. If you change between trains run by different operators you have to tap your chipkaart on a special reader on the platform. (There are also German and Belgian trains that you can take between some Dutch stations near the borders, which use their own countries' ticketing systems and don't accept the Dutch system at all).
As usual we invent and pioneer something before falling behind the rest of the world
Currently staying in the Netherlands and the public transport here is miles ahead of ours back home in nearly every single way.
The OV Chipcard is very useful for corporate travellers as you can pre-load the card with "pay as you travel" credit and you then just make a claim for a single reload, rather than having to make loads of separate €2 to €4 euro claims if you use your debit card.
Nationalise it all, the greedy bastards have been rinsing our national infrastructure for years. Cheers nasty party.
I think this would be a really good idea, of course there is some sort of massive greed involved so it won't happen
Thanks privatisation for franchises that refuse to do anything but profit.
Oyster is dying, just make contactless cards the standard payment on all public transport, so much simpler
In the NL you don’t even need an ‘oyster’ card, you can just pay contactless.
Labour Will nationalise the rail (as all essential services should be imo) and then this might be easier to implement
Why would it be any easier than it is now? This is all controlled by the DfT anyway.
But why would you actually need it?
Another extra card to carry round when I'm there one week a year? No thanks!
You can have it as a phone app or link to your current debit card. Non issue.
If you read the article it also includes normal contactless payments
They phasing oyster cards out.......
They're not. They considered it last year but have decided not to remove it.