Don’t get fobbed off with chavvy security standards

I have to admit that I’m not much of a public transport person; the word ‘public’ being the clue as to why I prefer travelling in the chav-free environment of my eco-friendly little Fiat 500 whenever possible. However, when I do risk jumping on a bus, or have won the lottery and can afford a train journey, I am always near terminally confused by the various ticketing options. What I would want, were I a regular public transport using type would be some kind of secure token system that I could just wave at a reader device and be on my way. Such things exist, of course, but there are a myriad different types and standards which just serve to confuse things as much as the paper ticketing mess does. And if things are bad for the consumer of such things, they are even worse for the transport providers when faced with proprietary technologies that are not interoperable across devices,which can be hellish expensive to acquire, deploy and maintain and, worse of all, are not as secure as they could be.