London may well be home to one of the world's oldest and largest public transport networks, but that doesn't mean that the city isn't open to new, innovative ideas. And this point has just been underlined by the announcement that London's world famous red buses wills start accepting contactless payment from today (December 13th) onwards.
The streets of the city are patrolled by as many as 8,500 vehicles and, under a new plan being rolled out by Transport for London, passengers will soon be able to pay for their tickets on the buses by swiping a credit, debit or charge card by an NFC (near field communication) reader.
Already, the city's public transport network operates the Oyster smartcard scheme, which relies on RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology. The system has proven to be a major success over the last few years, with many of the Oyster card readers having recently been upgraded to be compatible with both types.
While the news has been well received by most London commuters, an email to Oyster card users has urged them to exercise caution when swiping their wallet against readers if they own more than one NFC-enabled card. "If you present two cards together, the reader will normally reject them both," an email read. "But there is a small possibility of payment being taken from a card which you did not intend to use."
Since the Oyster card system was introduced in 2003, it has been accepted by a number of other towns and cities throughout the UK. Alternative types of contactless payment have not been so readily accepted, with a large number of consumers slow to start using NFC-enabled bankcards because they are unsure about its safety.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Windsor Holden, Research Director at Juniper Research, commented: "There are now more than 23 million contactless cards in theUK. But surveys that we've seen suggests only a very small minority of card holders are aware that they have an NFC-enabled card.
"Projects like this bus scheme are absolutely critical if the public is to be educated about the use of these cards as having them isn't enough - it's knowing how to use them, feeling confident about the security involved and then wanting to use them more."