No Change For The Bus? Just Smile And Wave – RFID + GPS Meets Public Transit
Back in early 1982, Ottawa (Canada’s capital) city’s transit system was trying out a new service whereby you could call a phone number and find out when the next bus for your stop (coded with a unique number) would be arriving. The way the system worked was that you called a unique phone number for a specific stop. A person would contact the bus driver, on the route in question, via radio-dispatch, then give you an approximate ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival).
PBX (Private Branch eXchange) phone systems were new then, and the transit system must have purchased a block of phone numbers. The service was great for the winter time, especially in Ottawa when the mercury really dropped. The problem was, people had to be hired to answer the phones, and bus drivers were distracted by these calls from dispatchers. Other smaller cities later had a similar service, but used automated systems – no human answering your query – and these automated versions were really just approximations based on the regular schedule. Unfortunately, that meant they were often incorrect and ultimately useless.
Of course, large cities that that run buses on 15-minute schedules or shorter probably don’t need either version of the ETA service. Nevertheless some cities are introducing a more accurate version the service using GPS (Global Positioning System) technology. New York is introducing such a service in Manhattan later in 2006 or early 2007. (Source: Waiting for the Bus.) A suitably-enabled device, such as a cellphone or smartphone/ PDA would then be used to check on the ETA of a particular bus. Much more accurate than the old methods, and no distraction to drivers.
While it’s difficult to understand why large cities with fairly frequent service would bother spending the money to set up a GPS-based ETA service, fare payment with smartcards (aka touchless or contactless payment) makes a bit more sense. Peppercoin and OTI Global in the US have jointly introduced a contactless fare card for transit riders in that works for both bus and subway. These smartcards contain an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) circuit known as an “RFID tag”, or just “tag”. Participants wave their fare card in front of an RFID reader, installed on select buses right beside the cash box, and payment is made from the card.
The U.S. is not the only country to introduce similar touchless transit fare payment projects. This sort of application for RFID technology makes sense, is convenient, and does not invade privacy like the smart passports that are being contemplated in a number of countries including the United States. Unfortunately, there’s still a big problem. These cards are not universal. Far from it. They typically cannot be used with other RFID systems.
The really big problem is that there is no set standard for RFID technologies around the world. Digital money applications are too fragmented, with little or no collaboration between manufacturers. The result is that you need one smartcard for, say, transit, another for shopping, another for movie theatres, and so on. Who wants to be carrying all these cards around?
Makers of these smartcards (and those paying for the applications) are doing no one a favour by not pushing for a worldwide standard. If you really want people to use digital money instead of hard currency, you want to make it easier, not more annoying. Thus a better implementation would be to use a more common device such as a mobile phone or smartphone or PDA, but only after some worldwide standard is defined and accepted. Let’s hope RFID manufacturers realize this soon, instead of expecting us to carry a separate wallet or purse for our smart cards.
Tags: technopedia, tech pedia, transit fares, touchless payment, contactless payment, RFID tags, smartcards, GPS-enabled devices
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