Tuesday, June 4, 2013

quicko: impending opals?

So I'm getting really excited about these potentially impending Opal cards I'm seeing Sydney gearing up for ... I presume they're going to be roughly like the Oyster cards London has (here's hoping!) and be much, if nothing else, sturdier means of paying for transport.  Possibly they'd even be so clever as to calculate my fares more cheaply (HA!), but at this point I'd settle for withstanding rain.  No idea when they might actually materialize, but the fact that I'm seeing ferries and train stations (and possibly buses?) getting equipped with readers for them I'm taking as a very promising sign!  Will keep you posted ...

2 comments:

Mom said...

From the title, I thought you were talking about getting jewelry, but it sounds like something just as valuable to you.

Laetitia :-) said...

Here in SEQld we've had Go Cards for several years (4?). Yes, they're sturdier (basically a credit card sized piece of plastic with a chip in it) and to encourage us to use them rather than paying for paper tickets the fares are cheaper.

They do have ISSUES though. Often the readers will forget where they are in the system and charge for fares that can't have happened (e.g. you get on and off within one zone and go no further than 6km but it thinks you started in a different zone and suddenly translated to another faster than a bus can go). If we've registered the card we can check it on-line and boy, does it pay to do that - the number of times it thought I'd touched on but not touched off so it recorded a base fare (higher than what I needed to pay) or thought I started my trip 15km away from where I did was not funny. I was getting at least two errors a week - and that was in 5 trips a week. That was when I had a job last year. :-)