Oyster Card: 10 Million + RFID Chips in London
The Oyster card is an RFID smart card used for electronic ticketing on London public transport services, notably the London Underground and buses. Other countries have similar smart cards. A couple that I've come across in real life recently were Boston's CharlieCard and Wellington's Snapper card. Some smart cards are used for other types of micro-payments as well as transport - for example Hong Kong's Octopus card and Japan's Suica card.
The Oyster Card and others like it are significant from a web technology perspective mainly because they introduce RFID technology to the masses; and this data will eventually end up being utilized on the Internet.
The way Oyster works is pretty simple: you purchase the card, buy tickets or concessions either at terminals or online, then swipe the card at a Reader when you take a train or bus trip. The Oyster card makes ticketing much more efficient for the consumer: no paper tickets, no handover of cash, little to no interaction with ticketing staff, speedier processing when entering the train station or bus. For the transport authorities, there are cost savings and instances of ticket payment avoidance / counterfeit are greatly reduced.
As the following statistics show, Oyster has been a very large scale deployment of RFID. The statistics are from a March 2008 presentation by Birkbeck College senior lecturer George Roussos:
- 10 million Oyster cards issued
- 5 million journeys a day
- 16,000 readers in stations
- 8,000 buses
- 2,600 readers at external retail points
- cash accounts for 4% today
Oyster Cards & The Web
Right now the Internet isn't a major part of the Oyster Card. There's a website for the card, where consumers can purchase cards and refill them (including an auto top-up option). But that's the extent of the site's functionality. [UPDATE: Andy Black comments: "You can [also] view your detailed journey history made over the past 8 weeks."]
The Oyster card has many potential Internet applications, particularly in the retail area. For example you might be offered personalized shopping offers in future, if retailers had access to your travel habits. Of course you may not want retailers to have that data; and therein lies the problem. So far security and privacy have naturally been the main concerns for the Oyster Card and similar smart cards.
Nevertheless, enterprising British geeks have been exploring less serious applications for the Oyster Card over the past few years. The Tinker.it! team in London wrote a post earlier this year outlining creative uses for the Oyster card. One was an interactive exhibition that translated a user's unique Oyster card id into a unique snowflake, which was then displayed on Tinker.it's office window for passers-by to play with.
While there isn't much of an Internet story yet for the Oyster Card, the fact that RFID chips and readers are so widespread in London (and for other smart cards in major cities across the world) means that there's much more data being produced about people in their everyday lives. That data is destined for the Internet, to be re-used, at which point we will see some very useful applications arise... if the privacy and security concerns can be assuaged.
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Oyster chips are dealing a good amount of work. Nice post.
Nice post. I would be broke without my Oyster card, and would get stuck in various parts of London due to lack of change without it!
I would guess that soon there will be location based services linked it to your Oyster card, for example getting Google adverts about shops near to the Tube station you've just come out of. Also a link in to Twitter that auto sends a tweet saying, "Just arrived at Oxford Circus..."
good
I have been researching the RFID Mashups domain back in 2007, and found out that there seemed to be only a single Mashup which would integrate RFID data.
Here is an excerpt from my project paper:
"Sherelog, the RFID Mashup found to be the only one of its kind, is a system that fetches data from a popular RFID train pass in Japan named “Suica”. It will visualise personal train-ride records obtained from this train pass onto Google Maps."
Info about Sherelog: http://bit.ly/uj6Dy
More info can be found from my research at http://bit.ly/IWACr
Michael
Thanks great,
I need very good thank
You might like to look at Dan W's post about his London Undersound and Oyster Challange projects, built during the Yahoo! OpenHackLondon event in May this year. It's a good indication of some of the things that might show up if Transport for London properly open travel data to passengers.
For example, I'd love to know how far I've travelled by tube in a year. A back of the envelope calculations shows it's about the same as a one-way flight from London to NY, but it'd be great to actually know for sure.
>consumers can purchase cards and refill them (including an
>auto top-up option). But that's the extent of the site's
>functionality.
Not quite true. You can view your detailed journey history made over the past 8 weeks. When filling in expense claims you now have to print out the info on the journey history and send it in.
Andy thanks for that info, I've added that to the post.
Michael, Paul, thanks for commenting - I will follow up on those recommendations.
Mastercard and VISA are afraid of Oyster uptake: if one day you can buy news papers and snacks in the Tube, then this becomes a treat to Mastercard and VISA as they are not controlling this money flow.
Barclays Bank have teamed up with Oyster for a combined "Oyster card, Credit and Contactless all in one card".
http://www.barclaycard-onepulse.co.uk/cardDetail.html
I have no idea what the takeup has been, but it clearly extends micropayment opportunities.
I use Oystercard and it works well although the web site is pretty limited and not that easy to download travel history - it would be great to be able to download a better list (as you can for phone companies, banks).
@Jonny Olliff-Lee:
I looked into this when building some web apps using Oyster data. TFL delay Oyster travel data becoming available for 48 hours after you made a trip, to prevent using Oyster for stalking etc.
As much as I'd love an app that update fireeagle based on Oyster usage I think their privacy choices are the right ones.
Convenient though the oyster card might be (I use one, albeit one not linked to my name or bank account, with a pretense at being anonymous - ignoring the fact that the time I go though the turnstyles my use is linked to time stamped cctv images).
I view the card scheme and its travel tracking as a major erosion of civil liberties, and it is a scheme which I can not turn off. Well, yeah, I'm not doing anything wrong therefore I have nothing to fear.
On the other hand, with data mining what if I were a Greenpeace activist, clocked going to stops near three known meetings in a month, and monitored thereafter.Nooo, that doesn't happen, never would, and there never were gas chambers. Those who can not remember history are condemned to repeat it. Some things should be applied with extreme caution, and travel tracking is one of them.