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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>He said: "I can't imagine a situation where everyone either will have a bank account and card suitable to pay and wants to.

>She said: "One of the biggest inequalities of modern tech and the widening gap is digital poverty, because there are people who are very reliant on their digital packages who take for granted their access to the internet. "There are still a lot of people paying in cash who could be flying under the radar. "If you do remove one-on-one payments and totally automate there's a group of people unable to use the service properly - or [have to] illegally - because they don't have a choice."

I am so happy to read this. Not everyday you have people caring about these sort of thing. Or May be tech is mostly dominated by Silicon Valley who dont sort of give a damn.

I still think Oyster card performs better than Visa PayWave / Master PayPass or Apple Pay / Google Pay. Although none of them are anywhere near as good as Suica Card in Japan.

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Private companies can, to a large extent, target and accommodate only a subset of the market.

However, a public transport system has to be for everyone. There are legal and political consequences to making it difficult or impossible for certain demographics to use public transport. There's also the fact that the most marginalised in our society are often incredibly reliant on public transport. That's why TfL and other public bodies have to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment for any policy change and take these things very seriously.

The removal of cash from buses seems (as mentioned in the article) to be a similar change. I wonder what the Equality Impact Assessment outcome was for that. Although that is less severe than removing cash as an option via removing Oyster cards entirely, as a homeless person could still reasonably use cash to top up an Oyster card and use that for the bus, instead of a contactless card - which I think a fixed address is required for?)

Buses going cashless was fully consulted upon. See the FAQs for the output of the EqIA:

https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/buses/cashless/

You're right that contactless cards usually require a fixed address, although some banks allow you to use any address you can receive post at (e.g. a friend's address).

This is why I roll my eyes anytime someone wants to "run government like a business". Government fundamentally must serve everyone, covering all the messy edge cases like unbanked people, and people who don't speak the native language.

Businesses look for efficiencies and that often means limiting their services to specific groups or requiring many prerequisites (either stated or implied). Government doesn't have that luxury and therefore has to be some level of inefficient. That doesn't stop government from offering modern internet-based services, it just means they have to keep the fallback process as well. For example, I can do my annual license plate renewal online with a credit card from the comfort of my home. If I don't have a credit card I can also go down to the ministry of transport office and pay in cash. A business could easily decide having physical offices all over the province is grossly expensive and make a switch to online payments only. Government doesn't (and shouldn't) have that option.

>Private companies can, to a large extent, target and accommodate only a subset of the market.

I absolutely agree. Except these private company were publicly advocating to abolish physical cash and top up card. Pushing their narrative towards a future which everything goes through Smartphone where the company have a strategic interest in doing so. While proclaiming themselves as the guardian of privacy and protector of their users.

This isn't the first time the subject of dropping Oyster card or any Top Up card payment in any part of the world has come up. Last time ( if I remember correctly it was 2016, roughly during the launch of Android Pay on Tfl or something like that, thinking about it now it might have been a PR piece ) there were people in the general public who really believe the future is cashless and all in Smartphone. And the general narrative at the time was dropping Oyster card some time in the future was inevitable because Tfl and other Transport companies around the world doesn't want the burden of running their own payment system in other to save cost. And if I remember correctly the answer Tfl gave at the time wasn't as clear cut as it is now.

So I am extremely happy to read a firm stand from Tfl on this issue.

Suica or any of the FeliCa-based cards in Japan are stunning really, the ecosystem is great. They're super fast, don't require sign-ups and work anywhere in the country nowadays, even in most shops.

And you can get virtual ones on your phone these days, auto recharging via credit card. Best of both worlds, works in way more places than contactless EMV.

And it still works even if you root your phone or install LineageOS, which is also a big plus for me (it's why I can't use Google Pay).

I assume your phone was sold exclusively in Japan? Foreign phones don't work with this tech.

Now worldwide iPhone supports Suica, but don't supported by almost all Android outside Japan.

These days some do. I have a Pixel 4a 5G. I bought it in Japan, but I don't believe it's a special Japan model in any way, and obviously doesn't have any special firmware either since I installed vanilla LineageOS on it. Worldwide models intended to be sold in Japan are starting to have the feature.

As long as the hardware FeliCa secure element is there, all you have to do is install the relevant apps from the Play Store (the apps themselves might be region locked; I do have my Play Store account set to Japan)

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7157629?hl=en

> Pixel 3 and later smartphones purchased in Japan have a FeliCa chip in the same place as the NFC chip.

So it's special

https://atadistance.net/2020/09/15/pixel-4-felica-outside-of...

So it isn't; all phones have the hardware. However, it seems something blocks the FeliCa apps from running on non-Japanese phones. It could be just a region flag.

(Don't trust customer support sites for technical information; the people writing those don't know how the real hardware works)

The manual recharge works in a "don't spend so much money on snacks" kind of way for me, so I've never adopted the auto recharge :)

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