The article itself is a very interesting summary of the technology used.
As for the comments, there seems to be a big discussion on whether NFC or barcodes (includes QR codes) are the better technology for public transport ticket I have a completely different view: No matter what technology you are using, after having used public transport in multiple cities in Germany with the same flat rate tickets, I wonder if this could be feasible in every city or country. Just not caring about a ticket seems to be the most user friendly option.
It seems to work well, but such a system would need to prove itself in areas where public transport is already quite crowded, like London.
I'd actually go the other way around. I see a lot more value in getting smaller public transit systems onto a common standard.
Getting set up to use public transit as a visitor to a top tier city like New York, Brussels or Montreal (I can't speak to London) is easy. Usually they have explanatory signage and staffed kiosks at all the major intercity transit stations. And good websites that clearly explain what visitors need to know to navigate the system.
It's visiting a city with a lower-tier transit system that tends to pose a greater challenge. I'm thinking here of cities like St. Louis, Milwaukee or Portland. Stations may not have attendants, automated kiosks may not be well-maintained, websites tend to be ill-designed or be missing key information about how to use the system, etc. And, on top of all that, I'm not necessarily visiting there often enough to amortize the (already relatively high, due to the aforementioned problems) cost of getting to know the system across may visits. And I certainly don't want to have 15 different transit apps and payment accounts to juggle. Standardizing the fare structures and payment systems could be a big boon to visitors.
There's potentially more value to the the smaller transit systems themselves in standardizing, too. None of them is individually a large enough system to achieve good economies of scale w/r/t the technical and administrative costs of maintaining their own special snowflake fare system.
"Not only should municipal transit be zero fare, using it should provide tax credits."
"This is a genuine, serious proposal. Cars and car infrastructure are so enormously expensive and destructive. Paying people to use public transit instead would be a net positive, and it's not even close."
As for the comments, there seems to be a big discussion on whether NFC or barcodes (includes QR codes) are the better technology for public transport ticket I have a completely different view: No matter what technology you are using, after having used public transport in multiple cities in Germany with the same flat rate tickets, I wonder if this could be feasible in every city or country. Just not caring about a ticket seems to be the most user friendly option. It seems to work well, but such a system would need to prove itself in areas where public transport is already quite crowded, like London.