Your face could be your ticket at the Tube station of the future — Wired — “One of the problems Cubic is trying to solve is the bottleneck that occurs at ticket gates when everyone rushes to dig out their ticket or pass. To avoid this crush, Cubic suggests removing the gates completely. Instead, its prototype system uses an object tracking system to track passengers as they walk through… Cubic aims to get this gateless tracking system to a UK station within the year.”
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Gateless is already in use with POP (Proof-Of-Payment) systems. However, it may be only be great with speed, convenience, and efficiency but when it comes to safety, no physical barrier could mean that a criminal could easily commit a crime (murder, steal, etc. in addition to fare evasion) and escape faster than emergency responders capture the criminal.
Do we really need to design every system for the criminal edge case? The gates that currently slow our transit systems are there primarily for collecting fares, not for slowing escaping criminals. We may move ten million people for every criminal that we slow down.
What I’m saying is that if gates are already slowing down movement flow, POP is already available and is used by numerous systems such as Vancouver TransLink, MTR Light Rail, and more. IC Card validators are available. However there are drawbacks to having gateless systems like POP and Cubic’s version.
Unfortunately it sounds like one more case of making the perfect the enemy of the good. What I am trying to suggest is that there is no parity between the “drawbacks” and the advantages.
We slowed down the introduction of gateless toll collection in New York by twenty years because the toll booth workers vote.
I fail to see how gateless toll road collection and toll booth workers vote in NY is related to transit AFC systems, Cubic’s own gateless validator, and POP.
Related to perfect as the enemy of the good. E-Z Pass might have bee adopted earlier if computers could vote.
On another topic, there are similar ‘gateless’ (actually it has gate flaps) validators in Japan (e.g. https://youtu.be/PbpgG7i5NrI https://youtu.be/hCApxANbWOc ), Korea (e.g. https://youtu.be/mvxmsFD2L0c?t=1m18s https://youtu.be/eSN0VR8cdjs?t=1m15s ), China (at least in Beijing: https://youtu.be/gDjAyzqul9Y?t=6m44s ), Taiwan (e.g. https://youtu.be/XvyrskyN-SQ https://youtu.be/HTkVqSKsZYY https://youtu.be/FEdZW32cnAU https://youtu.be/hfAp64T0Cwo ), and more.