This is just so hilariously absurd. Transit ticketing is a solved problem. You don't need fuzzy gait recognition when a $2 NFC card works 100% of the time.
also, ever notice those new stair gates with the large screen ads on elevated MTA stops lately? wonder what kind of sensors are running in there.
It's not just that ticket scanning solves the problem at low scale, it solves it permanently. At the point where the number of passengers on a train/subway scale to the point where it's infeasible to ask each of them to scan a card, it's also scaled to the point where you need to build new trains and more terminals -- at which point scanning paper cards becomes feasible again.
I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a scenario where tickets don't work better than gait recognition, and I can't come up with one.
It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better.
When the profit to be made is from ubiquitous surveillance, and doing it for public transport ticketing is just a convenient justification.
>It's not that tickets are enough, it's that they're better.
Especially if you want any sort of anonymity/privacy in public...
"How many Amazonian trees are cut for yearly need of tickets in London?"
The power draw from a camera is probably always going to be higher than the power draw from a short-range NFC reader. And the NFC reader is also probably always going to be less delicate and last longer, which is good because the environmental downsides of throwing away paper are negligible compared to the downsides of sticking electronic components in a landfill.
The way you prevent hoppers is you add a full gate that only turns once a person is authenticated. And then separately you authenticate at the gate using a sensible system like an NFC chip or swiped card.
Now, maybe the plan is to get rid of all of the gates then automatically bill hoppers later, so it won't matter if they board without a ticket. Let's ignore the fact that this would require a city-wide database of biometric data for everyone using the subway. Even assuming a city can pull that off, you really don't want to be using an authentication mechanism that can be circumvented by a burqa/hoodie/mask and a dress/crutches/pebble. So gait analysis isn't even particularly good for after-the-fact identification of hoppers.
Only slightly sarcastically: you’ve got it backwards here. If tickets are better then biometrics that’s why biometrics will win.
I would prefer not to replace "something you have and something you are" with just "something you are", I consider that a regression.
As an anon on Twitter likes to put it, it's inconvenient to rotate your face after a data breach.