Oyster card
The Oyster card is a payment method for public transport in London and some surrounding areas. A standard Oyster card is a blue credit-card-sized stored-value contactless smart card. It is promoted by Transport for London and can be used as part of London's integrated transport network on travel modes including London Buses, London Underground, the Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, Tramlink, some river boat services, and most National Rail services within the London fare zones. Since its introduction in June 2003, more than 86 million cards have been used.
Oyster cards can hold period tickets, travel permits and, most commonly, credit for travel, which must be added to the card before travel. Passengers touch it on an electronic reader when entering – and in some cases when leaving – the transport system in order to validate it, and where relevant, deduct funds from the stored credit. Cards may be "topped-up" by continuous payment authority, by online purchase, at credit card terminals or by cash, the latter two methods are available at stations and convenience stores. The card is designed to reduce the number of transactions at ticket offices and the number of paper tickets. Cash payment has not been accepted on London buses since 2014.
The card was first issued to the public on 30 June 2003, with a limited range of features; further functions were rolled out over time. By June 2012, over 43 million Oyster cards had been issued and more than 80% of all journeys on public transport in London were made using the card.
From September 2007 to 2010, the Oyster card functionality was tried as an experiment on Barclaycard contactless bank cards. Since 2014, the use of Oyster cards has been supplemented by contactless credit and debit cards as part of TfL's "Future Ticketing Programme". TfL was one of the first public transport providers in the world to accept payment by contactless bank cards, the widespread adoption of contactless in London has been credited to this. TfL is now one of Europe's largest contactless merchants, with around 1 in 10 contactless transactions in the UK taking place on the TfL network in 2016.
Background
Precursor
Early electronic smartcard ticket technology was developed in the 1980s, and was first tested by London Transport on bus route 212 from Chingford to Walthamstow in 1992. The trial demonstrated that the technology was feasible and that it would reduce boarding times. In February 1994, the "Smartcard" or "Smart Photocard" was launched and tested in Harrow on 21 routes. Advertised as "the new passport to Harrow's buses", the trial was the largest of its kind in the world, at a cost of £2 million, resulting in the issuance of nearly 18,000 photocards to the Harrow public. It lasted until December 1995 and was a success, reducing boarding times, being easy to use, and being capable of recording entry and exit stops and calculate the corresponding fare fee, i.e., pay as you go.However, the Upass smartcard of the South Korean capital Seoul was eventually the first to implement this technology on a wide scale, at the end of 1995, eight years before London did the same with the "Oyster card". In the UK, the first smartcard publicly rolled out was the BusCard in the city of Nottingham in 2000.
Operator
The Oyster card was set up under a Private Finance Initiative contract between Transport for London and TranSys, a consortium of suppliers that included Electronic Data Systems, Cubic Transportation Systems, Fujitsu, and WS Atkins. The £100 million contract was signed in 1998 for a term of 17 years until 2015 at a total cost of £1.1 billion.In August 2008, following a number of technical failures, TfL decided to exercise a break option in the contract to terminate it in 2010, five years early. However, TfL stated that the contractual break was to reduce costs, not connected to the system failures. In November 2008, a new contract was announced between TfL and Cubic and EDS for two of the original consortium shareholders to run the system from 2010 until 2013.
Brand
The Oyster name was agreed upon after a lengthy period of research managed by TranSys and agreed to by TfL. Two other names were considered, but "Oyster" was chosen as it was a fresh approach that was not directly linked to transport, ticketing or London. The other proposed names were "Pulse" and "Gem". According to Andrew McCrum, now of Appella brand name consultants, who was brought in to find a name by Saatchi and Saatchi Design, "Oyster was conceived... because of the metaphorical implications of security and value in the hard bivalve shell and the concealed pearl. Its associations with London through Thames estuary oyster beds and the major relevance of the popular idiom "the world is your oyster" were also significant factors in its selection".The intellectual property rights to the Oyster brand originally belonged to TranSys. Following the renegotiation of the operating contract in 2008, TfL sought to retain the right to use the Oyster brand after the termination of its partnership with TranSys, eventually acquiring the rights to the brand in 2010 at a cost of £1 million.
Technology
The Oyster card has a claimed proximity range of about. The card operates as a RFID system and is compatible with ISO/IEC 14443 types A and B. Oyster readers can also read other types of cards including Cubic Transportation Systems' Go cards. From its inception until January 2010, Oyster cards were based on NXP/Philips' MIFARE Classic 1k chips provided by Giesecke & Devrient, Gemalto, and SchlumbergerSema. All new Oyster cards have used MIFARE DESFire EV1 chips since December 2009. From February 2010, MIFARE Classic-based Oyster cards were no longer issued. MIFARE DESFire cards are now widely used as transport smartcards.MIFARE Classic chips, on which the original Oyster card was based, are hard-wired logic smartcards, meaning that they have limited computing power designed for a specific task. The MIFARE DESFire chips used on the new Oyster card are CPUs with much more sophisticated security features and more complex computation power. They are activated only when they are in an electromagnetic field compatible with ISO/IEC 14443 type A, provided by Oyster readers. The readers read information from the cards, calculate whether to allow travel, assess any fare payable and write back information to the card. Some basic information about the MIFARE Classic or MIFARE DESFire chip can be read by any ISO/IEC 14443 type A compatible reader, but Oyster-specific information cannot be read without access to the encryption used for the Oyster system. While it has been suggested that a good reader could read personal details from a distance, there has been no evidence of anyone being able to decrypt Oyster information. By design, the cards do not carry any personal information. Aluminum shielding has been suggested to prevent any personal data from being read.
Oyster uses a distributed settlement framework. All transactions are settled between the card and reader alone. Readers transmit the transactions to the back office in batches but there is no need for this to be done in real time. The back office acts mainly as a record of transactions that have been completed between cards and readers. This provides a high degree of resilience.
In 2008, a fashion caught on for removing the RFID chip from Oyster cards and attaching it to wrist watches and bracelets. This allowed commuters to pass through the gates by "swiping" their hand without the need to take out a proper card. Although the RFID chips were charged in the normal way and no fare evasion was involved, TfL disapproved of the practice and threatened to fine anyone not carrying a full undamaged card, although it is not clear what the actual offence would be, were a case to be brought.
Architecture
The Oyster system is based on a closed, proprietary architecture from Cubic Transportation Systems. The card readers were developed entirely by Cubic, whereas development of the back office systems was started by Fujitsu and completed by Cubic. The system has the capability to interface with equipment or services provided by other suppliers. The Oyster website is not part of the closed system but interfaces with it. Similarly, Oyster readers are now embedded into ticket machines produced by Shere and Scheidt and Bachmann on the national rail network.In early 2007, TfL and Deloitte worked to migrate the on-line payment systems to a more open architecture, using a number of open source components such as Linux, to resolve issues of lock-in costs, updates, incorporation of new security standards of PCI DSS, non-scalability, low and inconsistent quality of service, and slower response time to business changes.
Features
Registration and protection
Oyster cards can be registered, providing protection in case of loss or theft. Registration can be done online after the card has been used for a journey, or at a London Underground station, an Oyster Ticket Stop or a Travel Information Centre; to do so, the customer has to supply a security password and their postcode, which must then be cited when completing the registration online. Registration enables the customer to buy any product for the card and acecess to after-sales service, as well as protection against theft or loss.Sales
Oyster cards can be purchased from a number of different outlets in the London area:- Ticket machines at London Underground stations, which accept banknotes, coins, and credit and debit cards.
- London Overground & Elizabeth Line ticket offices
- Online, using the TfL website
- Through the TfL app
- Selected National Rail stations, some of which are also served by London Underground
- Travel Information Centres
- About 4,000 Oyster Ticket Stop agents
- By telephone sales from TfL.
Visitor Oyster cards can be obtained from Visit Britain outlets around the world, and from other transport operators, such as EasyJet and Gatwick Express, online, and from any ticket office. However, these limited-functionality cards cannot be registered. Any remaining credit on the card is refundable upon return of the card; the £5 price of the card is not refunded.
Oyster cards were initially free, but a refundable deposit of £3 was subsequently introduced in May 2009, then increased to £5 in January 2011. Deposits and unused credit may be refunded by posting the card to TfL; refunds are available by cheque in pounds sterling, by bank transfer to a UK account, as credit to another Oyster card, or as a TfL web account voucher. Customers must provide proof of identity and address for refunds exceeding £15. Refunds of up to £10, including the deposit, can alternatively be claimed in cash at London Underground ticket machines. Although the £5 deposit was intended to cover the cost of the card itself, ticket machines have no facility to retain the card, so customers completing a refund transaction remain in possession of a deactivated Oyster card. For cards issued since February 2020, the £5 deposit was replaced by a card fee, which is credited to the card after the first transaction made more than a year after issue. On 4 September 2022, the card fee increased to £7 and became non-refundable. On 7 September 2025, the card issue fee was raised to £10.
Unregistered cards can only be loaded with credit to use at adult pay as you go rates, and adult 7 day Travelcards.
Ticket vending machines on most National Rail stations will top-up Oyster cards and sell tickets that can be loaded on to Oyster. New Oyster cards are not available at most National Rail stations. At several main line termini, TfL runs Travel Information Centres, which do sell Oyster cards.