Roland Perry wrote:
at 14:13:12 on Tue, 28 Feb 2012, Adam H. Kerman remarked:

I wasn't thinking about ticket-printing machines, per se, but getting
back to another discussion we had in which the credit card number itself is
used as the ticket medium and the passenger gets billed for all passage
at the end of the month.

I've never encountered such a scheme.

Phoenix, Arizona, bus system, many years ago, attached card readers to
fareboxes. It was a home-made system. They had a way of uploading the
list of bad cards into the fareboxes once a day. At the end of the month
(or a 30-day period), they billed passengers at the lowest combination
of rates, whether a combination of single-ride fares or a monthly pass,
depending on how frequently they rode.

It was the most convenient fare collection system I'd ever heard of and
I always hope someone else will implement something similar.

What we're implementing in Chicago in a couple of years is going to be
handled by the banks and the card processors (with Cubic participating
as a small minority partner in the consortium) in which open-standard
proximity cards as credit/debit cards or transit-only cards will be
used as the ticket media at 4 cents an unlinked trip.

I sure as hell hope it's not going to result in a separate transaction
posted to the credit card per unlinked trip but something posted once
a month. These details haven't been made public.

There's a proposal to do *daily* billing via paywave credit cards for
travel in London, but I don't know how they propose to "inspect" the
ticket, because you can't 'load' one onto a credit card. I suppose
they'd need to use your credit card number to make an enquiry from their
own merchant account, to confirm you'd "touched in" recently.

Interesting.