Roland Perry wrote:

Sounds like one of those big public sector IT projects that fails to be
implemented properly. I'm quite impressed [1] at the way Oyster (and
separately the Congestion Charge) have been implemented over London, but
rolling it out to hundreds of provincial cities and deregulated bus
companies seems a little ambitious.

It's a project that would probably be better run by the banks as a
national smart-card micropayments system. Such a thing would be very
useful indeed - like the Dutch ChipKnip or the German Geldkarte.

Incidentally, Oyster is (in part) an EDS project...

Neil