On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, MIG wrote:

On Apr 24, 12:44*am, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:53:40 +0100, MarkVarley - MVP
wrote:

It would surely be dead easy to set the system whereby if you board a
bus within, say, an hour of boarding another on the same route in the
same direction you are not charged again.

They have bus to bus transfer in New York.

And Vancouver.

The first such system I remember seeing was in Lille in 1985 (also the
first place and time I saw platform edge doors and a driverless
metro). It didn't require computer programming, beyond that needed to
read a ticket and clunk it with a date and time. I don't think that
the principle of the restrictions and the automation of ticket checks
need to be confused or depend on each other.

You'd clunk your ticket on the metro in the centre of town and it would
be valid on your bus home at the other end, as long as you completed the
journey in a hour (I think). But in a larger city like London, the time
it takes to get home can be a lot longer, so there London, the time it
takes to get home can be a lot longer, so there could be complications.

The way it works in Vancouver (did i mention this already?) is that when
you get off the bus, you ask the driver for a transfer ticket. He has a
little machine which prints them at the touch of a button, much like the
ticket printers you sometimes get at deli counters in supermarkets. You
then surrender this when getting on the next bus. I don't know how the
validity works, but it would be simple for the printer to print a 'valid
until' time that's, say, 15 minutes after it was printed (and longer at
night or the weekend; it could even vary from place to place). Whilst i
think involving the driver is a bit of a non-starter in London, where
buses are a lot busier, me might manage something similar with Oyster
where you touch out of the bus to get your transfer entitlement or
something.

Hang on, no. Either i've remembered it wrong, or the system's changed. You
now get 90 minutes of travel from when you enter the system. If you get on
a bus and pay cash, you have to ask for a transfer ticket when you pay.
This is really annoying - if you forget to ask, or only decide you want to
make a multiple-stage trip after you get on, you're stuffed. On the other
hand, it works across buses, ferries and light rail, although not heavy
rail. They have zones (only three - centre, inner suburbs, outer suburbs,
although there's a quirk in that the centre zone includes the suburban
area to the west on the Burrard Peninsula, which is, handily, where my
relatives live!), and a system for upgrading a ticket to include more
zones partway through a trip.

tom

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