NYC Smartcards Die

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Chase, Visa and Mastercard have closed down their
smartcard trial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 
the NYT reports today.

It also says Mondex has closed its Swindon trial.

The problem in NY is that the system was too cumbersome
to use, needing special readers that were not always up to
snuff, compared to the familiar and reliable system for credit 
cards. Bribing users with start up cash didn't work either.
No one ever reloaded their cards. Not all merchants took them,
especially those handling only cash transactions.

Also, the cards could not be used outside the trial area, and
the paper says, "everybody leaves the Upper West Side,"
without saying where they go to kill time for the day like
out of work Koreans who dare not admit the sublimity
of being jobless at long last -- money cannot buy the joy.

Spokespersons say that they misjudged the customer's desire
for cash-like freedom and anonymity (my words). That the best 
prospect for smartcard future lies in captive users such as college 
campuses and the military where they expect an all-purpose card 
will catch on by providing handy ID and money, as well as (unsaid) 
perfect monitoring and data-gathering.

I'll keep my $12-balance card (never found a place to accept it) on 
the chance that it will be a valuable collector's item for the Edsel 
Electronic Opium Museum.

And we never leave the Upper West Side, well, once, to go to
the Harvard Club for a swell DCSNY. Great group, grim dump.