"Paul Corfield" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 16:28:42 +0100, "tim....."
wrote:


wrote in message
om...
In article ,
(tim.....) wrote:

wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Roland Perry) wrote:

In message , at
03:26:01 on Tue, 15 Jul 2014,
remarked:
and it's particularly bad at penalising you if you make a single
peak journey, only capping you at the peak cap instead of

off?

My guess too.

peak cap plus single fare for peak journey.

It even does this if the peak journey is a bus journey that has
no
concept of differential fares for TOD (and might even be
considered
as "free" if you exceed the bus cap for the day).

(I have no experience of it actually doing this, the above has
come
from reading the explanations, very very carefully)

I thought it would cap at off-peak cap plus single peak fare?

I think that's what Tim is saying it doesn't do.

That's why I was puzzled. I'm sure I read that that should happen.

It seems to say that, but it doesn't

It says:

Calculating peak and off-peak capping

As you travel, the system combines all the zones, times and fares
recorded on your Oyster card so it can calculate the cheapest cap to
apply. This means that sometimes you could be charged a cheaper
Off-Peak cap even if you've travelled during the peak. This is
because the system calculates the cost of:
.All the journeys you made during the peak
.All the journeys you made during the off peak

It then adds these together to work out which cap would offer the
best value. If this total is less than a Peak cap, you'll be charged:
.An Off-peak cap, and
.The cost of the individual journey(s) you made during the peak

If this total is more than the Peak cap, then a Peak cap will be
applied.

Do you see the subtle difference here between what it says, and what
you (and I) think it should say?

The question is? Is it just badly worded, or do they actually do
what the above says?

Maybe I'm missing something but how does that differ from what I said?
There
is one peak and a number of off-peak journeys.

Let's say the OP cap is 12.00 and the peak cap is 20.00.

A) you spend 15.00 OP and 3.00 P (18.00 total). It caps you at the OP cap
plus 3 pounds = 15.00.

b) you spend 18.00 OP and 3.00 P (21.00 total). It caps you at peak cap
of
20.00.

c) you spend 8.00 OP and 6.00 P (14.00 total, but crucially, more than the
OP cap). It charges you the OP cap plus 6.00 = 18.00!

(c) can't be right, but that is what it says it does

We have debated this issue multiple times and got precisely nowhere in
reaching a definitive conclusion. I've gone through presentations and
other stuff and explained it to people and just got tens, possibly
hundreds, of subsequent posts disagreeing with what was written or
doing "angels on pin heads" semantics on the language used.

I think there are only two options left.

1. Someone asks on the unofficial Oyster Rail website. Mike Whittaker,
the owner of said site, is pretty clued up on the workings of Oyster
and answers queries pretty quickly.

http://www.oyster-rail.org.uk/peak-off-peak-and-caps/

2. Someone writies in to TfL and asks them for a formal explanation of
the system workings for a variety of peak and off peak journey
combinations.

I really can't see, based on past experience, that anyone on this
group can provide the definitive answer.

I don't want a definitive answer, well I do but not to how it works

I want to know if the description on the website is entirely correct, or
just plain wrong

After all, it's only a web site. It isn't a difficult job (for someone at
TfL) to change it if it is wrong

tim