Is this the end of the annoying plastic cards?
It’s looking more and more likely that Melburnians could soon have another way of getting around town if they left their myki at home — and it’s about damn time. Public Transport Victoria is looking for up to 4,000 regular public transport users to trial using their smartphones to pay for bus, tram and train fares.
The trial uses the already existing myki reader technology to take transport fares directly from smartphones. According to PTV, the first phase of the trial found “passengers could top-up in a matter of seconds without having to queue for a ticket machine on their Mobile myki”.
In a Facebook post, state minister for planning Richard Wynne said: “We’re hoping to make travelling more convenient for us all, allowing us to pay for public transport travel using an Android smartphone.”
Wynne and PTV bring up one potential limitation to those looking to hop on the bandwagon. Sadly, this round of testing is only open to Android users at the moment. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that means iPhones are the inferior model or not.
