The Netherlands is currently in the middle of a large project to change the way we pay for public transportation. We are moving from paying with a cardboard strip (called the "Nationale Strippenkaart", which must be stamped by the driver of the public transportation vehicle you get on) to a new system (the OV-chipkaart) involving an RFID chip on which you can preload money or one or more subscriptions. The idea is not new (the Greater London Oyster Card is a well-know example) but this is the first time I know of that it has been done on a nationwide scale.
Needless to say there have been problems along the way. Michel van Eeten, professor of Governance of Infrastructures at the Delft University of Technology, recently gave an interview to the Dutch engineering magazine De Ingenieur in which he explained how the project is suffering from an implicit choice of offloading all of the project risks (security, privacy, and so on) onto the customer. A few days ago I had a similar experience with problem offloading onto the public by this project…
Continue reading Public Transportation pass woes….
