How do TFL contactless payments work?

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Specifically: how do the gates know where I’m tapping in and out, and how do they know how much to charge me? How do they figure out a weekly cap? How are they programmed/engineered? Just give me all the info you can on TFL gates lol

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m not sure how those work exactly but if it’s similar to the one we have in Korea, then your card has a tiny computer chip that has a name. When you tap your card in one place the kiosks remembers the who, when and where. When you leave you tap your card again, the kiosk matches up the who. The time is tracked so they know if it’s during high volume or low volume because the two tend to have different prices. Then the where is used to tell how much you owe which is then deducted from the card.

Edit: forgot to add that the card has no money on it. The only information on the card is the who. Everything else is monitored on the servers.

Maybe TFL is different and I wonder how.