How Did They Mess Up Making Public Transport Payment Actually Convenient?

I spent a large part of my off-hours in the evening attempting to sort out the mess that is auto-reload of my new EZ-link card.

For the busy, I failed: there will be no auto-reloading of my EZ-link card from now on.

For the less busy, here's a longer narrative.

SIN city uses the contactless (wrongly named, since we still need to contact the card to the reader to ensure it gets read properly anyway) card that is run by the EZ-link company. This EZ-link card has a built-in ``expiry date'' of around five years---I suppose there's a technical reason, if not for the policy one of ensuring that any new technology will be rolled out eventually without having to support too many legacy cards out there.

The normal way of topping it up (or ``reloading'' the said card) is to use one of the ticketing machines found ubiquitously at MRT stations and bus interchanges and pay using one of the standard cashless payment mechanisms to add value to the card.

Then there's the auto-reload way of linking it via a GIRO order. For the confused, a GIRO (short for General Interbank Recurring Order) is a system that allows direct payment via bank transfers within SIN city between participating banks and associated billing organisations. This system of auto-reloading for the travel cards has been in place since the late 1990s, from the old magnetic farecards of yesteryear to the current generation of CEPAS cards (check out this CNA article for some details).

To say that it is convenient is to severely undersell it.

Fastforward to today.

My old card is about to expire this year, and so it was time to get a replacement. It's my third overall card ever since the contactless farecards were in use (or my second replacement). I did my due diligence of heading to the EZ-link website to find out about how to enable the beloved feature in my new card.

To my horror, I discovered several things:

1. They phased out GIRO for regular cards, (but kept it for concession cards);
2. Any auto-top up required the installation of yet another app onto one's mobile phone with its associated finagling; and
3. There was a severe restriction of payment methods available for actually doing the top-up.

I verified this myself while going through the process to see if there was any way around it.

I couldn't install the app in my standard phone because my Google Play account was tied to the US for some reason, and the app limits itself only to SIN city Google accounts. Changing countries involved surrendering payment details to the Google Play store, an action that I refuse to partake because I do not intend to purchase anything from the Play store (need to know basis). And even if I did, there were a whole bunch of other waiting times that were just not worth it.

That was not that big a problem---I had an alternative phone that could set it up.

Then I underwent the whole song-and-dance of adding a payment method. I only have a debit card, and the app allowed me to proceed with the whole registration process, only to fail when I tried assigning the card to the auto-top up. Now the debit card that is verified (through Stripe, no less), but is grayed out.

What does it mean? I have no fucking clue.

Reading the reviews, it turns out that the app used to allow debit cards too... but they were mysteriously removed. So now the app is effectively useless for anyone who doesn't have a credit card. There were also other reports on how the NFC feature was a hit-and-miss, and there were weird double-deduction issues for payment, with resolutions taking as long as three weeks.

🤦‍♂️

I feel like I've dodged a bullet there. It's okay, I can be a peasant and just top it up manually. It works out to be around SGD50 a month for me anyway, so it's not that big a deal. The routes I take tend to pass by some kind of ticketing machine, and there's always the ATM top-up route if I'm really lazy.

``But MT, why don't you have a credit card?''

Good question. Short answer: I don't feel like getting one. I don't spend often enough to justify holding one of these ticking time bombs that implode if I don't pay enough attention to it.

There was an alternative plan of using the so-called SimplyGo account-based payment option. They touted a lot of benefits, but the actual implementation sounded even dodgier to me than the stunts that EZ-link was pulling.

No feedback on the amount left on entry/exit, even heavier dependence on the existence of a mobile phone (with associated app and payment method), more finagling to ensure that the correct payment method is used, and the creation of a definite point of failure that is the mobile phone with dodgy NFC capabilities.

Yeah... hard pass.

I did muse that if I had to have a bloody good reason to spend nearly 100k on a new car, it would be to avoid all these increasingly bullshit nonsense for basic public transport travel.

And yes, I was sufficiently annoyed at the whole sordid affair that I took the time to write something here as we near stupid o'clock, instead of turning in early in preparation for yet another work day of meetings.

Till the next update then.