Neil Williams wrote:

That is one thing I don't get about Oyster. As a completely new
system, it surprises me that it wasn't designed to be 100% automated
from day 1 and used as an excuse to get rid of ticket offices, not
actually increased their use by creating a load of new transactions
that can only be done at one.

Another mess comes with the student cards - for the last few years the photo
card has been combined with a new Oyster (previously you just took along the
new photocard to a ticket office and they updated the Oyster discount) and
it's impossible to transfer over balances on the old card online (I last
tried this at a ticket office years ago). Similarly some of the season
tickets at student discounts can't be purchased online.

I can just about understand this in the old days, but surely the Oyster
cards themselves are now registered as student discount when issued? And the
student status verification system is much more sophisticated than the old
"get the students' union to sign and stamp a paper form" - it's now done
online (my renewal this year was made one evening, automatically emailed to
the college registry, where I happened to be temporarily working at the
time, and verified first thing in the morning) so there should be all the
reassurances TfL need without requiring people to trek to poorly staffed
ticket offices.