"Clive Page" wrote in message
...
On 02/01/2014 16:24, tim...... wrote:

If TfL are expecting your average foreign tourist to start paying for
tickets using "pay wave" credit cards I think that they are tilting at
windmills

I walk from St.Pancras to King's Cross tube station quite frequently and
continue to be surprised at the number of arrivals from Eurostar who head
straight to the enormously long queue for the ticket office, when there
are plenty of ticket machines with no queue or only a small one.

It could be that some of them are conditioned by the near impossibility of
using ticket machines at stations in France (and for that matter in the
Netherlands) if you are a non-native. I recall arriving at the RER
station in Charles de Gaulle a few years ago and finding that the ticket
machines accepted neither UK credit cards nor Euro notes. I was able to
avoid the extremely long queue only by being able to feed in at least two
dozen small coins (which fortunately I had left over from a previous
trip).

You only have to look at the number of suitably "qualified" individuals
who don't go through the self service passport check (at no risk and
sometimes considerable time cost) to see how "frightened" the average
person is of such technology

Well my experience of these things at airports is that they only recognise
my face or iris about one time out of three, and that if it fails I have
to queue up for the manned barrier anyway after a few minutes, so that on
average there is little or no time saving.

Really?

Whenever I watch the "helpers" on the self service q they seem to go out of
their way not to reject people (with a valid chip pp) back into the "normal
q,

It's nothing to do with "fright": if the technology gets better maybe more
of us will use them. I'm told that the new-fangled facial recognition
systems are slightly better than the old iris scanners, but my experience
has not provided me with much evidence of that so far.

--
Clive Page

On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 08:46:47PM +0000, Clive Page wrote:

It could be that some of them are conditioned by the near impossibility
of using ticket machines at stations in France (and for that matter in
the Netherlands) if you are a non-native.

The only problem I've had with ticket machines in Paris is that they use
funny foreign coins that I don't recognise very quickly, which makes it
hard to figure out what to put in. If only Europe would adopt a single
currency, such as the pound.

--
David Cantrell | Godless Liberal Elitist

"David Cantrell" wrote in message
...
On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 08:46:47PM +0000, Clive Page wrote:

It could be that some of them are conditioned by the near impossibility
of using ticket machines at stations in France (and for that matter in
the Netherlands) if you are a non-native.

The only problem I've had with ticket machines in Paris is that they use
funny foreign coins that I don't recognise very quickly, which makes it
hard to figure out what to put in. If only Europe would adopt a single
currency, such as the pound.

I've been using the Euro, day in day out, for 50% of the time since the day
they were minted, and I still can't tell what value a random small coin is,
without reading the value on it.

And for those that don't know, they have different patterns on the edge so
that you can tell then apart but I'm ******* if I can remember which value
has which edging.

(and before anyone mentions it, yes I can tell the copper from the bronze,
it differentiating within those sets that I can't do)

tim


--
David Cantrell | Godless Liberal Elitist

On 06/01/2014 17:16, David Cantrell wrote:

On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 08:46:47PM +0000, Clive Page wrote:

It could be that some of them are conditioned by the near impossibility
of using ticket machines at stations in France (and for that matter in
the Netherlands) if you are a non-native.

The only problem I've had with ticket machines in Paris is that they use
funny foreign coins that I don't recognise very quickly, which makes it
hard to figure out what to put in. If only Europe would adopt a single
currency, such as the pound.


Paris TVMs (both RATP and SNCF Transilien) don't take notes, which is a
bit annoying.

On Wed, Jan 01, 2014 at 10:02:14PM +0000, Paul Corfield wrote:

I recognise that the queues might be at ticket machines instead but
it's not the same thing.

Thornton Heath, this morning, had a looooong queue almost out of the
door of people trying to do Oystery things. I just walked straight to
the ticket office and bought my monthly travelcard, no queue at all.
So, for today only, I welcome the Oyster PTB not giving a **** about
those of us in south London and not bothering to properly supply all the
facilities necessary for Oyster to be worth using :-)

--
David Cantrell | even more awesome than a panda-fur coat

There are two kinds of security, the one that keeps your sister
out, the one that keeps the government out and the one that
keeps Bruce Schneier out.