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Soon, a ticket to ride won’t require paper coupons, tokens, human vendors, or even Boston’s CharlieCard. Urban transit is abandoning a century old payment system for sophisticated digital payment technology, says George Kocur. Kocur has been toiling for a decade on technology and methods that will enable transit industry operations to become more intelligent and efficient. He notes that many cities have already acquired an assortment of improvements — smartphone apps, and GPS networks to keep transport on time, for instance. But these are often expensive proprietary services and products offered by a hodgepodge of vendors. Kocur makes the argument for developing non-proprietary systems, especially around fare payment, which could be utilized by multiple transit authorities, reducing costs over time. He describes the evolution of a “generic e-collection technology framework,” based on a standardized, ’contactless’ payment card used in many stores. This card, bearing valid credit after an online or phone transaction, can serve riders as a monthly pass, or even a single trip ticket. It’s also very fast. In New York City tests, the e-collection card managed a transaction with a server via fiber optic network in 200-300 milliseconds on subway rides, and 400-800 milliseconds on that city’s buses (wireless data moves a tad slower). In contrast, Boston’s CharlieCard has a built-in chip that calculates the cost of the trip and debits it from the card, consuming valuable seconds. Kocur is also working on a “fare engine” that maps “a set of card taps into a set of journey segments,” and groups these segments into trips, and trips into fares. Complex algorithms come into play, and the end result would permit riders real-time options on both journey-routing and fares. This software is flexible enough to work in London, New York and other cities, optimizing for each system’s travel network. To accommodate riders without bank credit, researchers are coming up with option...
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Video Length: 0
Date Found: December 13, 2010
Date Produced: December 13, 2010
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MIT World |
July 07, 2011
In three presentations that look back to digital-age milestones, and glimpse ahead to what may come next, speakers share some previously undisclosed stories, great enthusiasms, and a few concerns. Nicholas Negroponte tells a few “dirty secrets” about the start of the MIT Media Lab, including ...
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MIT World |
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MIT World |
June 13, 2011
Drew Davidson likes to play with blocks in his sandbox, as he demonstrates in a show-and-tell to interactive media colleagues. In this case, the playground is an online game called Minecraft, a two-year-young internet sensation with millions of followers, developed single-handedly by a ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox “nothing less than astounding,” and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation. In her lab’s empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
The ultimate questions for this Sandbox 2011 panel, posed by moderator Alan Gershenfeld, are “Where is technology not working? When is technology not the answer?” That’s a bold agenda for a panel of children’s media creators and a roomful of other producers in the industry, from Sesame ...
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