Saturday, June 14, 2008

UTA going to smart cards

Article from today's Tribune about UTA going to smart cards.

Need a ride? Show some plastic

It will be interesting to see how these will play out. The benefit is that they can keep track better of passenger boardings.

Bill Tibbets and his gang of yellow shirts, or are they orange? are pushing for the UTA to lower fares in the city. Of course they don't look at the other side of the coin to see if this will produce enough revenue to pay for itself but that is another story.

Of course if UTA does lower fares just in the city of Salt Lake, shouldn't the city be the one to pay for it?

That also brings to question the whole proposal by the yellow shirts. Lets say UTA actually did lower fares just in the city of Salt Lake. Why should someone traveling the same distance pay more because they live in Murray?

Of course the people who make these proposals never look beyond the basics to look at the other side of the coin or the unintended consequences of what they propose.
Zemanta Pixie

2 comments:

Jesse Harris said...

I really wish folks would wake up to the insecure nature of RFID (including smart cards). All it takes is about $10 in parts and a minimal amount of technical knowledge to duplicate one of these cards from a distance of under 10 feet. I'm sure that we'll see all kinds of issues once these things get introduced.

Nick said...

What's the problem that the smart cards are supposed to be solving?

There seem to be a lot of cities (LA, Vancouver) moving towards high-tech ticketing systems, for dubious reasons.