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

Tourism was the reason TfL started the contactless card ticketing project in London, and it's the same reason TFI want to do it now.

Leap is great for residents, but for someone spending a couple of days in the country, paying a fiver for the card then putting money on it that you'll never get back is a bad deal, so they end up using cash or trying to buy tickets in person with a card.

It costs a lot of money to deal with this, so the idea is to cut out the middleman and let visitors use the card (or phone in the case of Americans, many of whom don't get contactless cards from their banks) that they already have on them.

One great thing about Leap is that it is a nationwide system: that means when contactless card payment is added to it, it will become usable nationwide. That might encourage tourists to use more public transport, which in turn could make improved PT a viable proposition in some parts of the country.

After the upgrade is finished will there be no equivalent of a prepaid public transport card that can be bought and topped up using cash?

Yeah, there was some confusion as to whether it would work, but it did indeed. I checked my Revolut earlier to double check I wasn't dreaming it! The rest of our group were very impressed by it. It is a strange concept hopping on an IC train for nearly two hours with nothing to show for it. But it worked great.

Yes, the short fare on the bus should be dropped. A second flat fare reader should also be installed at the drivers machine on the left as you enter to really increase the flow of people boarding. Sometimes the read can be bad or people wave their card like a wand, which won't work. With the rear door for exiting, that is as good as you are going to get for loading and unloading a double deck city bus.

Do you mean Leap for 'can't get the money back'? You can request a refund to any IBAN account. Done it whenever I've had to change Taxsaver; and when getting rid of my original card and going Taxsaver back in the day.

Just use an expired Taxsaver as a normal Leap now, which did cause trouble on a barrier once where it tried to read the old ticket first

less than 10% of all journeys on Dublin bus are paid for using cash. If you were running this service you'd be thinking that implmenting all that new technology and cost just to facilitate such a small number of customers is a bad business decission.

It's still the right thing to do but you have to agree that the Leap card and its adopotion has been really good.

Also cash fares are much more expensive than leap so will the future % of tap payments be still very low as you get cheaper fares using leap?

All online. Can refund to any SEPA account.

Have they confirmed that tap fares are the same as Leap as if so then Leap is finished and has no future.

The reason you can't pay for other stuff on Leap is down to Central Bank regulations, paying for random stuff would require some form of banking licence or Central Bank regulatory oversight and you simply don't want to go there

Suica/Pasmo works great

Its amazing how Germany, Austria, Switzerland etc have great ticketing systems without any of this NFC business at all, they focused on the problem not the technology and built something much much simpler

Oyster is still well and truly alive in London, so no I don't think that will happen anytime soon.

Leap Visitor is valid only in Dublin, and is bad value if you're only taking one or two trips.

@goingnowhere those countries developed regional Fare Unions in the 1960s, which unified ticketing across different providers. The paper ticketing infrastructure put in place at this time is cheap to continue using as it is all paid for, but these organisations are moving to electronic payments too as that equipment comes towards end of life.

One major reason why they could do this and Dublin could not is that those countries have very strong local government (for example it is Munich City council that owns the Munich U-Bahn, not the Bavarian State, not the federal German government), and it is the cities (or groups of cities) that led the creation of those fare unions.