London Banter - View Single Post - Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off

Michael R N Dolbear · April 25th 14, 03:58 PM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote

(Recliner) wrote:

Yes, it's one of the mysteries of OSI, which was designed to benefit
users, but sometimes costs them for reasons that aren't instantly
obvious. I hadn't come across this variant before; more commonly, it
attempts to combine two fairly lengthy but legit journeys to create one
that breaks journey time limits, thus creating two (expensive)
unresolved journeys. I really think the algorithm in that case should be
smarter, and it should
abort the attempted combination of multiple OSI journeys if it would lead
to unresolved compound journeys.

I agree. OSIs are nothing like as helpful as they are touted and should
have
sanity checks. In fact any putative unresolved journey should be subject to
sanity checks for possibly legitimate journeys. I realise that may be
impossible for the original Oyster technology but the system is changing.
The helpline should be a lot more generous about refunds in the meantime.

As noted elsethread the contactless card implementation should be able to do
better since it can see the whole day.
Oyster has to make its decisions step by step with a possible batch refund
the next day - do these still occur ?

--
Mike D