No foresight

It was disappointing to read “Singleticket Bangkok public transport pushed back to 2020”, (BP, June 16).

Bangkok has a mostly functional, and rapidly expanding, public transport system, yet it lags so very far behind other large cities in the implementation of very basic technology to allow passengers to use one card (or device) to travel on the entire network.

Hong Kong has had such a system for more than 20 years and London’s Oyster card will celebrate its 16th birthday this month.

Even when Bangkok’s system is introduced, it will not cover all forms of public transport, and it seems that the media is not pressing hard enough to discover the real reasons behind the delays.

Every week we get some glowing report on how well the “Thailand 4.0” project is going, and yet we see in this — and in some of the archaic banking technology (only being able to access certain services at your home branch or home province, for example) — that they’ve not yet fully come to grips with version 1.0. R DEBLACLEUR