If you look really closely on the inside panel of the gate dividers, you'll see some little red dots. These are part of a presence detector. If you trip one of these the gate stops responding. So, say you are traveling with a child and you have them ahead of you as you try to check them through the gate. They trip the sensor and the gate doesnt work. The same often happens when people put their suitcase in front of them. I often find passengers stuck trying to get through the gate like this

2/n

When people have annoyed me doing this when travelling with my bike, I've sometimes pushed my wheel forward slightly to trip the sensor to block the gate from working in the hope the other traveller will bugger off. This issue could be resolved by installing a second wide gate per line, and making them unidirectional. But that would in theory reduce gateline capacity. Which is already pretty awful.

Why so? Well you see that round circle on the top? That's a nfc, and qr reader. And it sucks
4/n

Passengers will try to scan an object to gain permission to pass the gate. Originally this was just an OV chipkaart. A simple NFC card based on MyFare classic. But, cos the people who design and implement these design abominations aren't the people who use them. They decided that you should be able to scan a QR code from your ticket to use the barrier. Which is slow, requires almost perfect alignment, and requires you scan the right qr code. Which is a pain as some ticket types have >1 qr.

5/n

... When the phone switches from your pdf qr code to the phone wallet, it scans your card, charges you €20 for a checkout without a check-in, and let's you through. Bravo, great design. FFS

Then you get users who intend to use the phone as a payment device. These passengers tend to present as someone who's queued to get to the gate, then act totally surprised they now need to scan their device. They then stand there, faffing with their phone trying to bring up the wallet with the right card
7/n

At rush hour this is particularly infuriating.

But even if you're a regular traveller who knows how these things work, there's design "features" in the gate that are there to really piss off the user.

Now I have my OV Chipkaart on the outside of my wallet, I just pull the whole wallet out, place it on the scanner, and walk through. Absolute minimal faff. Except.

You remember those red dot sensor thingies? They bring a whole new way to piss you of once you've scanner your card.
8/n

If you scan your card and walk too fast, the sensor trips and then the gate refuses to open. You have to take a step back. Wait a second or two for the system to think about it. Then it opens. Except at rush hour you can't step back cos theres 400 people behind you who just want to get out the station or catch their train. Why is this feature there? I'm guessing cos the designers are sadists who have never used a train. But I can't be sure.

They could also be incompetent.
9/n

Now if you scan your card, and walk through at just the right speed, but someone decides to try and tailgate you, an alarm goes off. Except the sensors have no way to tell if you're being tailgated by a human... Or your luggage... Or your bike... I like to think of this alarm on the wide gate as an awesome bike alert...

But it gets worse. That scanner, if the passenger behind you scans their card quick enough the gate stays open. Win. This maximises throughput. Except. They fuck this up
10/n

What does this mean? Well if the second passengers card isn't read properly and they are walking fast enough, there's no difference visible to them between a successful scan and an unsuccessful one. In the noise of a busy station they may not notice the tailgate alert, and instead only find out when they get charged €20 for a invalid check out or checking out without checking in. Or get fined by a train conductor...

Such great design.

It makes me want to scream every time I use one.

12/n

How did something this shit get through validation testing? How do the designers feel knowing they spent all that time at uni, to make such a shit device. It's up there with cats arsehole toilet roll dispenser in the pantheon of mind bogglingly awful designs.

And what's most annoying of all, is that it didn't need to be this awful. TFL for all their innumerable faults, had a great design of gate. I'm talking the pneumatic ones, not the shitter new ones.

But we don't even need gates at all
13/n

Some stations where the layout or traffic pattern doesn't allow for or justify the expense of the gates (i.e. Maastricht, or Schiphol), they just have a card reader on a post you can use to check-in/out. Sure this reader has all the same issues as the one on the gates. But the faults due to the mechanics & sensors of the gates are at least avoided

In case it wasn't evident earlier. I really fucking hate these ticket gates. It's such inexcusably bad design

Thank you for letting me rant.
14/14

@max @quixoticgeek
Cash till they roll out a sane and actually secure electronic interface that uses IBAN to transfer.

Chip and Pin is better than NFC, but has a serious security flaw and isn't contactless. There is a €50 cap here on NFC payments without PIN. Not sure that isn't too high! But the NFC system has fudged in security and wasn't originally secure at all. Something different is needed for contactless.