Suica penguin

<rant>

Ima­gine if you could down­load an app and tap a few onscreen but­tons to cre­ate a Tap and Go pub­lic trans­port pay­ment card that lived inside your phone.

Then ima­gine that you could add some dol­lars to this card with a couple more taps. Now you’re using it on buses, trains, in con­veni­ence stores, at vend­ing machines; at res­taur­ants; every­where you’re likely to go in a day: no wal­let required, just your phone. Trans­ac­tion his­tor­ies would show up in the app; you’d always know your bal­ance, and you’d nev­er be caught short.

Slick, and con­veni­ent; and it would remove small and annoy­ing bar­ri­ers in every­day city life sev­er­al times per day. You might even use pub­lic trans­port a bit more!

Well, won­der no more: there is good news. Such nir­vana exists. The bad news: it’s in Japan (and maybe else­where too… but not here). There, Japan Rail East has built out their Sui­ca card (their equi­val­ent of our Snap­per) into an amaz­ing and use­ful cash and small pur­chases ena­bler. If you hap­pen to be going, down­load the Sui­ca app to your Apple-Pay enabled iOS device and run through these (Eng­lish) instruc­tions. You’ll be able to use your new vir­tu­al card on buses and city trains almost every­where in the entire coun­try just by tap­ping your phone to the read­er. It’s suf­fi­ciently entrenched now that at least in Tokyo you’ll have a decent chance of not need­ing to carry cash on you (and Japan is a notori­ously cash-cent­ric soci­ety).

It doesn’t seem like a big thing, but believe me, once you’ve exper­i­enced it you’ll nev­er want to go back to the old-style ways.

Well, what about Wel­ling­ton? Are we close to any of this?

Unfor­tu­nately: no. And the really sad thing is that we’re not mov­ing for­ward, we’ve been going back­wards.

For a brief and shin­ing moment it really did look like we were on track to achieve this kind of pub­lic trans­port nir­vana. Back in 2012, it was pos­sible to have a Snap­per card remotely pro­vi­sioned and embed­ded in your Android phone (the “Touch2Pay” ser­vice), and use it for pub­lic trans­port and for small pur­chases at con­veni­ence stores, just like you can today with Sui­ca in Japan. There was every pos­sib­il­ity that this would con­tin­ue to grow and expand to the extent that I would not be writ­ing these words six years later.

But now: Touch2Pay is not offered any more; and if you can find a dairy with a Snap­per card read­er it will be for offer­ing top-ups to the bal­ance only, not pur­chases. Snapper’s Ride­Bank card is nice, but it’s still not let­ting me get rid of a stu­pid piece of plastic (and is it slow at the card read­er or what?).

And there’s no integ­rated tick­et­ing: we still can’t use Snap­per on the trains after ten years.

So what happened? Where did the future go?

I wish I knew.

Yes, yes, I know: we’re a small mar­ket; tech­no­lo­gies change; busi­ness shit hap­pens; people aren’t as excited about the tech­no­logy as we’d all hoped; but really this feels like anoth­er fail­ure of vis­ion, not neces­sar­ily or wholly from Snap­per – at least they tried – but across the wider trans­port­a­tion sec­tor and region­al and cent­ral gov­ern­ment. Col­lect­ively these are the people with the abil­ity to push this kind of con­nec­ted-up ven­ture through our intro­ver­ted, small, overly self-import­ant and per­son­al­ity-driv­en busi­ness sec­tor.

The cur­rent bus time­tabling and route mess? Same people. Dif­fer­ent symp­toms of the same prob­lem. It’s all just so… inad­equate.

</rant>