On 8 May, 20:53, Boltar wrote:
They lived in Cambridge and had no intention of getting Oyster cards
(£6 in deposits?). Welcome to London.

I get the feeling there are many people on here and in TfL who simply
don't want visitors in London , or if they do at least not using
public transport.

I'm happy to have visitors in London; I'm happy for them to use public
transport; I'm glad that TfL provides a great deal of clear and
readily available information in a wide variety of languages to
explain to them how the system works; and I think it's right that
people can hand Oyster cards in at any ticket office to get a refund
of the deposit.

But if people can't be bothered to find out how the system works, or
just avoid it out of spite (why on earth did the Cambridge residents
above have no intention of getting Oyster cards? Even if they were
never planning on going to London again, they could hand them in at
Finsbury Park or KX for a refund...), then I don't see any reason why
the system should go out of its way to accommodate them. As it is, TfL
does allow people who are clueless about the system to use it, but
imposes a fee for the inconvenience they cause.

[if I went to Tokyo without checking how the public transport system
worked, and then got hopelessly lost because all the station names
were in Japanese and I'd only written down my stop in phonetic
English, this would mean that I was a raving idiot, not that there was
a problem with the Tokyo metro].

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org