Why is this obvious unsustainable? The IC readers and contactless payment readers are normally built on exactly the same tech, or very similar tech. And they’re pretty much always just a single reader capable handling IC cards and contactless payments locally, with back office processing to manage bookkeeping, and any needed external transaction processing.

TfL in London has been operating paper tickets, contactless and IC card for something like two decades now. The IC system is starting to show its age, but that’s only because the current stored value cards don’t have enough on-board storage to handle the continued growth of TfLs systems, and all the new regions they now operate in. But even if the IC system they have plans to migrate and merge their IC and contactless system into one system that can handle both payment types and provide proper feature parity between them.

I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.