In message , Paul Corfield
writes
I may be wrong but surely you can see your history if you have an on
line account not just if you have actually undertaken a top up
operation? I have only recently added a "real" PAYG card to sit
alongside my staff one so the normal customer interface for Oyster is
something I have limited experience of.

No you cannot. You can only see the history if you actually top up
online - and I have always topped up at a ticket machine (or a ticket
window if I'm passing and there is no queue).

I tried to find out whether I would be able to see past history if I
topped up yesterday or only future history, but a serious web search
failed to find the answer. Do you happen to know? Since I had topped
up on Friday (because the £10 overcharge had left my balance too low to
finish the day) I didn't really want to put more in TfL's coffers.

I agree it's not worth my time, but a principle is at stake: if the
system is so poor that many people get overcharged, and the victims
don't try to get a refund, the authorities at TfL will have no incentive
to improve things. As it is, of my 29 minutes on the phone, at least 10
were also occupying the time of someone they were paying, so I suspect
that small salary cost will act as a tiny incentive on them to fix the
problems. Against that - Oyster problems have been going some time, and
the problems don't seem to diminish.

If you can remember your journey pattern and are prepared to share it
then people here might be able to assist. The journey info will still
be held on your card (assuming you've not made a further 10 trips) and
an LUL office can print that out for you as can a TfL bus ticket
machine.

I don't have the journey history yet - it takes *48 hours* to get it
emailed, according to the man on the Oyster help line (how stupid is
that, when you can get an instant printout at a TfL station). I suspect
that the error at London Bridge may have been that my card didn't
register on a gate but I got through because it was still open from the
person in front. I have a vague memory of the gates closing rather
promptly behind me, which they don't usually do.

From now on I shall make sure that I only enter a gate which is already
closed, to make sure that if my card doesn't work I will know about it
(there doesn't seem to be any other way of being sure about this). I
realise that If everybody did that it would severely reduce the gate
throughput at peak hours, but that's not my problem.

I also don't understand why the system is so dumb. The sequence of
events for my first problem, with approx times, was:

16:30 Forest Hill entry - recorded ok
17:00 London Bridge NR exit - possibly not recorded
17:05 London Bridge tube entry - recorded ok
17:30 South Kensington tube exit - recorded ok

Even if my exit at London Bridge NR was missed, it should have been
possible for an even slightly intelligent system to work out what
overall journey I was making, and record the correct charge for it.

And I still don't have the faintest idea why, after my first overcharge
of £4 for the unresolved journey, I then got overcharged another £6 when
doing only another two journeys that day, going through only 4 more
gates all at TfL stations.

What? - about 2% of all travellers using magnetic tickets? - if that's
your definition of "many people".

Well that makes many people in total, even if small in percentage terms.
But my sample is of people living outside London, where we have the
choice of a ticket to London Terminals (or Thameslink) plus Oyster
within London, or alternatively a London One-day Travelcard which is all
on a single paper ticket. Almost all of those that I know who have this
choice are still using paper tickets throughout. Some have tried Oyster
and given up, having had problems like mine, others are simply baffled
by the complexities. Many don't even realise that in some circumstances
it would save them a pound or two now and again to use Oyster, but in a
few cases I think it would be more expensive. Working out which is
which takes a lot of time and effort.



--
Clive Page

On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:00:32 +0000, Paul Corfield
wrote:

I have no expectation that Oyster will ever be 100% perfect - I don't
expect that to be true for HK or Singapore either.

I think it may be - but it's only because Singapore don't do anything
"clever" like Oyster does. Oyster is, so far as I'm aware, by far the
most complex of these schemes, so it is going by definition to have
more difficulties.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:54:59 +0000, Roland Perry
wrote:

Does that figure exclude people with paper season tickets and
outboundary travelcards?

Many of those might well be happy to use Oyster if it were available
to them. Indeed, I can perhaps see a day where Travelcard seasons are
issued in two parts - an Oyster for the 1-6 (or 1-9) bit, and a paper
ticket for the rail bit.

If TfL could get to a point where the magstripe reading parts could be
decommissioned on the barrier lines, they could save a fortune.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

The online journey history can sometimes takes several days to update,
and is also sometimes missing entries (and indeed exits). No idea why
this is the case.

The other day I made a journey of bus, NR (£2.00), NR (£2.00) and bus again
and was capped at £5.10 as it should have been. When I checked the online
journey history a little later that day the balance had dropped by £7.50
(consistent with a £1.20 bus, £2.00 NR and £4.30 NR entry) before correcting
to the £5.10 drop a couple of hours later. So clearly the online system was
updating reasonably quickly with the correct balance and yet none of my
journeys had appeared in the journey history at that stage (first to appear
was actually the first NR exit which of course shows as a £2.30 refund to an
as yet unseen deduction). My last two bus journeys from nine days ago still
haven't appeared and yet again the balance perfectly correct. It seems
curious that the online system always seems to know the correct balance to
within a few hours and yet seems ignorant of the journeys behind it.

The online journey history is still infuriating in the way it displays
transactions. I can appreciate that the source information probably does
only contain date and time, location, amount deducted/refunded and balance.
That's fine, but why on earth differentiate between a deduction and a refund
with a '-' above the deduction? What is wrong with with writing
e.g. -£4.30? Better still use separate columns and, horror of horrors, what
about using colour? What about using icons to distinguish between tube, NR,
bus, DLR and tram? Is this really asking so much?

Also at the moment the 'Price cap' column doesn't seem to be indicating
anything as it used to.

G.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 01:16:36PM +0000, Martin Petrov wrote:

In reality, I've never actually NOTICED that the technology has been the
source of the problem, most of the time it's been my mistake ...

A system that makes it easy to make expensive mistakes when they could
easily be "designed out" is faulty by design.

For example, a web site where you hit the "pay" button, and nothing
appears to happen, so you hit it again, and get billed twice, is faulty.
Or a ticketing system that has arcane rules about when you need to touch
in (and then makes it hard to find the necessary equipment) is faulty.
That the Oyster rules are arcane and weird is obvious, you just need to
look at the questions that get asked about it here. It therefore follows
that the design is faulty.

Yes, I know, the faults (well, some of them at any rate) are down to the
TOCs being sulky, but that doesn't stop them from being design faults.

--
David Cantrell | Bourgeois reactionary pig

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 12:00:08PM +0000, Clive Page wrote:

So I phoned the Oyster "help" line, which took me another 29 minutes.
I *think* the issue is no resolved, with another refund of around £6.

Does that include a refund for the 29 minutes you spent calling their
scam, errm sorry, "special" rate phone line?

Have TfL taken leave of their senses in implementing Oyster Cards?

Yes.

Oyster is a good idea, implemented badly.

--
David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice

Eye have a spelling chequer / It came with my pea sea
It planely marques four my revue / Miss Steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word / And weight for it to say
Weather eye am wrong oar write / It shows me strait a weigh.

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 06:45:48PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:54:59 +0000, Roland Perry
wrote:
Does that figure exclude people with paper season tickets and
outboundary travelcards?
Many of those might well be happy to use Oyster if it were available
to them. Indeed, I can perhaps see a day where Travelcard seasons are
issued in two parts - an Oyster for the 1-6 (or 1-9) bit, and a paper
ticket for the rail bit.

If TfL could get to a point where the magstripe reading parts could be
decommissioned on the barrier lines, they could save a fortune.

Just out of interest, how, then, would one buy a ticket from Brighton to
Edinburgh? You can't expect the ticket offices at Brighton* and
Edinburgh to keep a stock of Oyster cards. Nor could you reasonably
expect everyone travelling across London to find and queue at two ticket
offices one either side of the city, one to pick up a silly little plastic
card and pay for it (having already paid for a through ticket), and the
other to hand it back and get a refund. That would be even crazier than
OEPs!

* or for even more fun and frolics, consider a less well-used station,
such as Bexhill

--
David Cantrell | London Perl Mongers Deputy Chief Heretic

While researching this email, I was forced to carry out some
investigative work which unfortunately involved a bucket of
puppies and a belt sander
-- after JoeB, in the Monastery

In article , (Clive Page)
wrote:

No you cannot. You can only see the history if you actually top up
online - and I have always topped up at a ticket machine (or a
ticket window if I'm passing and there is no queue).

I was told on the Oyster helpline this morning that, while this is true
now, they hope to allow it shortly for everyone.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

In message , David
Cantrell writes
On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 12:00:08PM +0000, Clive Page wrote:

So I phoned the Oyster "help" line, which took me another 29 minutes.
I *think* the issue is no resolved, with another refund of around £6.

Does that include a refund for the 29 minutes you spent calling their
scam, errm sorry, "special" rate phone line?

Fortunately I was able to do it on a Saturday when I *think* it is
charged by BT at zero. If when I get my next bill I find something
different, I shall be really annoyed.

By the way, I have now got my journey history by emailed PDF file, but
it took TfL more than the advertised "up to 48 hours". It shows that
the missing gate at one section of London Bridge was the problem, and
that passing through a tube gate at London Bridge a few minutes later
didn't allow the system to work out what I was doing.

I'm more concerned about the fact that when I called at the ticket
office at South Ken the man claimed that he had sorted out my unresolved
journey and given me a credit for it, but actually he had not. That
partly explains why there was ~£6 overcharged by the end of the day.

I arranged to get a refund at King's Cross St.Pancras, and I'm going to
London tomorrow and may well need to use Oyster, only not there, so I
shall not be able to check whether I really get the credit. Such an
unnecessarily restrictive system. I think I understood that if I fail
to collect the credit within 7 days, I can spend another 29 minutes on
the phone trying to get it applied somewhere else. Aren't I lucky.

--
Clive Page

In article , (Clive Page)
wrote:

Fortunately I was able to do it on a Saturday when I *think* it is
charged by BT at zero. If when I get my next bill I find something
different, I shall be really annoyed.

0845 is included in BT bundles now. Mine is 24/7 for calls up to an hour
but the basic option is weekends only. I can imagine some calls to the
helpdesk could go over an hour but not too often.

The poor people who are really buggered by the shutting of the 020 7227
xxxx number are mobile users.

--
Colin Rosenstiel