TfL took one million contactless payments in nine days

Last week TfL started taking contactless payments on its entire transport network, adding the tube, Overground and DLR to the existing system that exists on London’s bus service. Today the company revealed that one million contactless payments have been accepted.

It’s worth pointing out that the majority of those payments, 785,000 to be precise, were accepted on London’s bus service which has already had the system in place for the past year — meaning people have been able to familiarise themselves with the new system. So in reality only 375,000 payments have been taken on London’s rail services.

That being said, it’s still an impressive number for such a short period of time. Even more impressive is that only 1,700 of those payments occurred as a result of ‘card clash’ i.e. people trying to pay with an Oyster Card and the machines registering the credit card instead.

How adoption of the new system will occur in the future is unclear, but the fact that the fair is set as full adult fare regardless it’s still cheaper to pay with an Oyster Card.