Auckland Transport tap to pay

Forums › Transport (cars, bikes and boats) › Auckland Transport tap to pay - no online auth?

lchiu7

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#318047 10-Dec-2024 08:04

Somebody mentioned to me that the new tap to pay feature on AT does not do online auth of the credit card. It does a reconciliation at the of the day. If that is true it seems a little strange since with mobile EFTPOS etc. how hard is it to do an auth check on a card in real time? Anybody in Auckland can confirm this?

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Oblivian

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#3318695 10-Dec-2024 09:05

Not looked at how they're implemented here, but if it's anything like the aus ones, rather than put a hold on your card like gas station's for everyone to moan about cause they didn't read that's what it did.

They consolidate at either, the end of trip - point to point = known charge.

Or a default fee, if there was a failure to tap off. Which needed an open end billing.

trig42

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#3318703 10-Dec-2024 09:19

Their HOP card readers (on buses anyway) were never online either - they stored it all locally and batch processed at the end of day at the depot.

KiwiSurfer

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#3318721 10-Dec-2024 10:35

lchiu7:

Somebody mentioned to me that the new tap to pay feature on AT does not do online auth of the credit card. It does a reconciliation at the of the day. If that is true it seems a little strange since with mobile EFTPOS etc. how hard is it to do an auth check on a card in real time? Anybody in Auckland can confirm this?

This is standard for public transport systems -- I am not aware of any public transport fare systems anywhere in the world that does online auth for Visa/MC/Amex. AT here uses the same system (MIFARE) used in many transit systems overseas. I suspect offline auth has been used for two reason. Firstly, they want the barriers/validators/etc to process cards as quickly as possible -- Visa/MC/Amex/etc can't do it quickly enough. To give you an idea of the standard required, the standard AT HOP (MIFARE) fare cards are designed to auth in <300ms -- this ensures if 200pax gets off a train at a major station the fare gates can process them all fairly quickly. Secondly it probably makes it easier to consolidate the day's trip into one price and charge that -- many places do day caps etc which means it doesn't make sense to charge for every tap and then reverse back the discounts applicable once the fare cap is reached. For the standard AT HOP cards, under the hood a tag on actually charges a default fare and then this is reversed at the end of the trip to the actual cost of the trip (this was obvious in the old AT HOP website which leaked some info of how the system applies fares) -- this means a missing tag off will leave the default fare applied.

So yes quite common and expected. Nothing out of the ordinary.