November 2009

And suddenly it came to me, like a vision- in the future, we’ll simply present a bar-code to a reader to pay our fares. Everything we’re doing today with ORCA cards and so forth is a kludge.

Bar-code readers on the trains will speed boarding, and in busy areas it will be possible to simply stop the train in the street and open all doors for boarding and leaving. This in turn decreases the number of very long stations that are required to deal with very long trains, and when you can substitute the reworking of an existing street for the construction of a station, you’re starting to save some real money.

Worried about zones? Just bar-code in and bar-code out and charge for the mileage. Proportioning revenues to political jurisdictions would be a snap.

We’ve all seen the robustness of the scanner in the supermarket. How long will we wait to bend the complexity of our desires to the simplicity of this device? Well, just until that day, 5 or 10 years in the future, when the powers-that-be concede that ORCA will never work very well, and start searching for an alternative.

Students of rail history will recall that the Stockton and Darlington, opened in 1825, was originally intended to act as a sort of toll road, where the user supplied the cars and the horses to pull them. It wasn’t long after that that it was decided it would be best if one company had total control of what ran on the road and when.

For years it was a matter of debate as to whether the alternate form of management could ever work. Now, according to this post at the Transport Politic, “mainland European high-speed rail competition will mean more than one company competing on the same lines, similar to the way deregulated air service works”.

SNCF is probably hoping they won’t have the same problems AMTRAK has dealt with in sharing rails.