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Transport for London, which oversees mass transit in the United Kingdom capital, could replace its prepaid contactless Oyster cards with transit-enabled mobile phones or bankcards by 2010, an agency executive told some of the city's elected officials Wednesday. Will Judge, the Transport for London head of future ticketing, made the comments before the London Assembly, according to press reports. The comments amplify previous ones made to CardLine Global sister publication Cards&Payments, which has reported the agency wants to embrace contactless credit and debit cards that support such payment applications as Visa Inc.'s payWave and MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass. An agency official also has said its recent test of ticketing with mobile phones that carry the Near Field Communication application proved "wildly popular" (CardLine Global, 23 June). Oyster is Western Europe's largest transit fare-collection system, with 10 million transactions each day. The agency will begin its normal replacement of some 20,000 Oyster terminals around 2010, giving officials a chance to upgrade equipment to accept other cards or devices. The agency earlier this year also said it was canceling its contract with vendor consortium TranSys to run the Oyster scheme. The cancellation came after technical glitches with the scheme and after Transport of London officials said they wanted a cheaper way to run the fare-collection system.
