Kinetic in Townsville (and I assume Cairns and Rockhampton received them at the same time) have had those white machines since at least early 2024, there’s a good chance they’ve been around longer than that too.
It was a pleasant surprise when I was back home in Rocky earlier this year. I wasn’t aware at first it was a smart reader until I noticed someone else tap on! It makes it so much easier then having to scrape change together.
I posted a photo of one of those readers in this thread back in January.
From what I understand it was Kinetic itself that implemented an EFTPOS system of their own as a stop gap measure with blessings from DTMR until the official system gets rolled out.
I’m not sure why that hasn’t been rolled out in the Tweed area, but I’d presume that Transport for NSW has something to do with it.
Knowing TfNSW obstinance regarding any form of cross-border cooperation, Tweed will probably end up part of the Opal network, rather than accepting go card/Translink card.
Has anyone here heard anything about the go card replacement that was supposed to start this year after contactless payments were rolled out across SEQ?
They would need some kind of transitional period of 12 weeks to get people to change over their cards as well. If they were planning this before the years end they would have to start a marketing/awareness campaign by Oct.
I imagine that transition process will include the rollout of the digital go card for iOS and Android devices, which is the thing that I’m the most interested about.
New York had to introduce a physical OMNY card that’s basically a fake bank card, controlled by Mastercard and all. (Mind you: OMNY is was commissioned by Cubic… Same as Smart Ticketing.)
From what I’ve read, it looks like the MTA has pretty much given up on introducing a digital token, telling passengers that if they want to use smart devices to travel the only option is by using bank cards on Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay and the like.
So if we get a go card 2.0, then we might get exactly the same thing.
Just saw on FB which is disappointing from a tourism point of view. I believe NSW is still accepting Amex.
You would think with the influx of US tourists and with the Olympics approaching having Amex as part of the payment platform is more important than ever.
At least they have started accepting more prepaid and gift cards
We have new ways for customers to pay for their travel on public transport with contactless Visa, Mastercard and American Express credit or debit cards, including reloadable and non-loadable options (this includes physical and virtual prepaid cards, travel cards and gift cards issued as contactless Visa or Mastercard).
The logic is that the Queensland Government as a whole look to no longer be accepting AMEX payments. A lot of departments including Queensland Courts, TMR (for rego, etc), the Qld Revenue Office and Worksafe Qld have all stopped accepting AMEX over the course of the year.
QR codes are meant to be accepted soon as well to cater for mobile ticket purchases and event ticketing. In Adelaide, they have already turned on that functionality.
New card reader stickers spotted on Bus Queensland (Westside) units, without the Visa/Mastercard/AMEX/go card add-ons and also without the “smart ticketing” wording.
I’ve noticed that translink has also changed the wording on bank transactions so that they now only say “translink ticketing”, compared to “translink smartticket" of before.
Now that this portion of the rollout is complete, I assume that there’s little point maintaining the differentiation between smart and not smart ticketing.
