Contactless coming to Metrolink

[sprunt]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-48853860

Greater Manchester's tram network is to adopt a London-style contactless payments system, the region's mayor has announced.

Andy Burnham said the plan would be rolled out from 15 July.

It means people will be able to quickly tap in and out of stations rather than using ticket machines.

Mr Burnham said the change would "improve access to jobs, leisure, skills and education opportunities across Greater Manchester".

Similar to London's system, the scheme will feature a payments cap, which will be automatically calculated based on which of the four Metrolink zones people travel to.

The cap would never exceed £7, the cost of an anytime one-day travel card across all four of the network's zones.

This initial step is part of Mr Burnham's Our Network plan, a ten-year project to improve transport in the region.

The system is expected to be later adopted on buses and trains, aping London's Oyster card system.

Mr Burnham has also promised a plan to extend the tram system to Stockport by the end of the decade.

Well, it can't be worse than the Get Me There system. Ideally there will be future enhancements for capping beyond a single day (my typical use case for Metrolink is a weekend pass bought on Friday evening for use between Piccadilly and Bury then, returning on Sunday - it looks like I'll need to keep buying the paper ticket for this) but it's good to see progress inching forwards.

 

[rebmcr]

Dare I imagine that they've finally seen the light, and contracted TfL to provide the Oyster backend?

 

[WatcherZero]

God no, Oyster is obsolete and TfL have been slowly modernising it.
Oyster Gen 1 launched in 2003, in 2007 they migrated the backend from the original manufacturer to open source software, in 2010 they launched second generation ITSO based cards and upgraded the readers for contactless/ITSO card reading allowing products to be stored on the cards.

In fact TfL have improved the original Oyster so much they actually licensed their improvements back to the original developer cubic.

This is a backend TfGM have developed themselves and its also been shared to be the backend for Northern and TPE smartcards recently launched and for the upcoming Pan Northern smartcard as well.

 

[Mojo]

There is already a thread on this started a couple of weeks ago
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/metrolink-pay-as-you-go.184135/

Thread locked.