The cost to upgrade public transport ticketing system to contactless - how much?

243 million a year is quite a lot of money but complex IT systems are very expensive.

Ah, my mistake!

It was always a commercial decision. Technologically there is no barrier, as Leap cards and phone-pay/contactless cards use the exact same technology. This is not by coincidence: much of the development of the contactless payment system is based on work done on behalf of Transport for London to allow debit-card ticketing for the London 2012 Olympics. Phone payment is nothing more than an implementation of the same contactless system: the reason there's no €50 limit on your Google/Apple Pay is because a big tech company has made an agreement with the credit card companies to take on more of the fraud risk: they have not changed any of the actual technology.

There's one big problem with using credit/debit cards on transport... their purchase cycles can be very long, and can require a live connection to the "bank" (I say "bank" as I don't want to drag you into the tangled web of how card payments actually work). Leap and other wallet systems on the other hand are offline and near-real-time: when you tap, the card balance is updated and stored on the card, and the terminal stores the record of the transaction. The terminal sends that transaction record to the backend later, within about 1 minute, but usually quicker than that. The key thing is that there's no need for your leap card or the terminal to enter into a live exchange with any backend server. The time needed to process a passenger is the 1 second needed to read and update the wallet information stored on your card. Transaction time is essential for transport ticketing: Melbourne tried to roll their own system and it was so slow they ended up having to make the core of the tram network completely free to use becuase asking passengers to tap on was creating long boarding delays.

At its fastest, contactless card payment is actually not much slower than the Leap card (your €50 of tappable purchases is very similar to the wallet credit on a Leap card, so it doesn't need the lenghty transaction approval process), so you'd think it'd be just a matter of allowing tap to pay on the buses, using the exact same stuff as at a coffee shop… and that's how I'm sure this will be framed in the shouty press when the cost of the project is discussed…

But it really is not as simple as that. First problem that arises is when you want to do more than just let customers buy a fixed price ticket from the bus driver (e.g. Luas zonal fares, system-wide fare capping) , and the second is how you deal with customers who have exceeded their tap limit. Both of those situations need a much more complex backend IT system that has to comply with the very strict security standards of the payment card industry. That all adds cost.

Answer to 1 is that you pre-charge the customer for a day ticket, then at the end of the day, refund part of that if they don't make enough journeys.. but you need to not charge again when the passenger taps off, which means you need to have a pretty close to real-time record of transactions. That's not how your typical merchant terminal works.

To implement all of this and then maintain it for a system with a couple of hundred million transactions a year (the whole country), €24 million doesn't sound that bad.

Is going cashless stuck waiting on this to complete, and if so, why? We could go cashless tomorrow.

The current ticketing machines cannot handle card payments, so no, we couldn't.

Not going to fly. Needs to be a way for people who do not have a leap card to pay.

There is: go buy a bloody leap card. I don't understand the weakness of this decision. The amount of time and effort wasted handling cash is extraordinary. It should have been dropped three months after the leap card was first introduced.

Their Leap equivalent has huge, huge problems so I don't want them copying that bit, thanks.

Rather hard to actually purchase

Giant credit needed to take any heavy rail trip

Refund for an expired card needs you to visit a TVM to 'cancel' the card after applying for the refund online, so if you leave the country, they keep your money.

We'd need to get rid of all the remaining single door buses to go to tag-off also but I don't expect that will ever happen - tag off, not shifting the old single doors.

Try being serious, please.

What about tourists?

And what about people not from Dublin who have no need for a Leap card except when they're in Dublin?

Or just people who have forgotten their Leap card as a poster above mentioned.

To be fair, and in response to the other person who had a negative side to the system, I was just there for the week but travelled around the country and within cities with the family. I may only have registered the cards to get the discounts available for kids.

The most painless travel I've encountered in any country.

The public transport system is not built entirely for you and your specific usage patterns. Thankfully.

Excluding significant portions of the user base because you're OK with it isn't going to happen, no matter how many times you gripe about it.

I think - but again, limited use cases here - that the dutch system works with international Visa Debit cards which would be most?

I amn't sure how flat fares work when you are trying to encompass all public travel types and locations.