Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

In message , at 20:51:18 on
Wed, 23 Apr 2014, Richard remarked:
a user should be able to keep to the "always touch in and out"
requirement -- regular, tourist or whatever. It isn't difficult!

There are still bear-traps for the unwary. For example getting off a
train at a London terminus having travelled that far on a paper ticket,
clutching an Oyster for onward tube travel, and using it to "always
touch out" at the barrier line, results in an unresolved journey.
--
Roland Perry

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

In message , at 00:56:04 on
Thu, 24 Apr 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:
I think points 1 and 3 are key. For their part, a user should be able
to keep to the "always touch in and out" requirement -- regular,
tourist or whatever. It isn't difficult! (But let's not speak of
Wimbledon.) There needs to be only a tiny risk of trouble, having
complied with this rule. Much of this will be moot once we've got CPC
going on all modes, but still applies to any ITSO schemes.

Why will it be moot with a CPC? You will surely be required to touch
in all the same places as an Oyster user does to generate an adequate
transaction trail to allow TfL to calculate fares and caps.

There is nothing magical about a CPC that allows TfL to determine
you've avoided Zone 1 if you haven't touched on a pink validator at a
relevant defined interchange.

Or that you've touched something n-1 or n+1 times by mistake, creating
an unresolved journey.
--
Roland Perry

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

In article , (Roland Perry)
wrote:

In message , at 20:51:18
on Wed, 23 Apr 2014, Richard remarked:
a user should be able to keep to the "always touch in and out"
requirement -- regular, tourist or whatever. It isn't difficult!

There are still bear-traps for the unwary. For example getting off a
train at a London terminus having travelled that far on a paper
ticket, clutching an Oyster for onward tube travel, and using it to
"always touch out" at the barrier line, results in an unresolved
journey.

Go through a gate that opens in front of you and discover the touch hasn't
been registered, giving an unresolved journey. My wife got two out of two
from King's Cross to Westminster and back in 2011.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

Go through a gate that opens in front of you and discover the touch hasn't
been registered,

I have never seen that happen when it was definitely my own card that opened the gate. When a large crowd is pushing through the gate may have opened for the person in front or the person behind. Even so the problem is more likely to be somebody trying to slip through as the gates open for you.

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 02:50:13PM +0100, Mike Bristow wrote:
In article ,
David Cantrell wrote:
Tue 15 Apr
09:15 - 10:14 Thornton Heath - Aldgate East: GBP 5.30
18:49 - 19:56 Aldgate East - Thornton Heath: GBP 5.30

The Aldgate East - Victoria Fare is 2.20 peak/offpeak.
The Victoria - Thornton Heath fare is 3.70 peak, 2.60 offpeak.
Off peak starts in the evening at 19:00.
So there are _four_ possible fares for the journey home:
as a "two leg" trip, with both legs peak: 5.90.
as a "single leg" trip at peak time: 5.30.
as a "two leg trip", with the Vic - Thornton leg offpeak: 4.80
as a "single leg" trip at offpeak: 4.10

That means that if I leave Aldgate East at 18:49 I should be charged
a total of 4.80, because I won't go through the NR barriers at Victoria
until after 19:00. But I'm actually charged 5.30.

--
David Cantrell | A machine for turning tea into grumpiness

Immigration: making Britain great since AD43

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 03:25:23PM +0100, David Walters wrote:
On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 14:01:08 +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
Well, mostly happy. Once I'd found out that they'd ****ed up, and I'd
filled in a form on their website, there was an additional step
required. Before they could refund me, they had to talk to me on the
phone. Which is a bit of a problem, because I'm deaf, but eventually and
with the nice gentleman in the call-centre repeating himself a lot we
got it sorted.
They claim to have a Textphone. Is that any help in these situations?

Not really, because I'm not deaf enough to make such an expensive device
necessary. And if someone is going to communicate using text, the
interweb is a much better medium. And because as far as I can tell all
textphones are designed to work with those obsolete fixed line things. I
don't even remember where the BT socket is in my flat!

--
David Cantrell | A machine for turning tea into grumpiness

Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla.

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 09:46:19AM -0500, wrote:
In article ,
(David Cantrell) wrote:
Oh, there are lots of other things displayed. But unless I stop and look
carefully while people queue up behind me, and then pull my phone out,
navigate to the right page on TfL's website, and carefully compare the
two - the "information" isn't useful information at all.
It tells you the fare deducted and the new card balance if it's not one of
the old gates.

Not useful, unless you're in the tiny minority that have memorised what
the fares should be and who know what their card balance is at all
times. And you still have to stop and bend down to see what it says
while the person behind is trying to push you through the gate because
they're not expecting you to stop and admire the scenery.

--
David Cantrell | semi-evolved ape-thing

23.5 degrees of axial tilt is the reason for the season

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 06:15:39PM +0100, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 14:16:46 +0100, David Cantrell
wrote:
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 02:49:09PM +0100, Paul Corfield wrote:
I've used Oyster for years - PAYG and combined with a Travelcard. I
have had one mischarge in all that time which I queried and which was
resolved within minutes. I do keep an eye on my charges as I travel.
That you know that you should keep an eye on it makes you unusual.
I suspect I am not that unusual in keeping track of Oyster
transactions. I see an awful lot of people paying attention to the
displays on bus ticket machines when they've tapped their Oyster Card.
I expect they're doing that for a reason rather than for fun.

To me that looks like people checking to see whether the silly thing
registered their card at all given how hard it is to distinguish the
bleeps from all the other noises coming from peoples' phones and over
the background noise of shouting chavs, screaming children, and honking
white van drivers.

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

" In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's ... programs should be
indented six feet downward and covered with dirt. "
--Blair P. Houghton

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:08:41 +0100, Paul Corfield
wrote:


However the alternative is that thousands of journey combinations are
priced via Zone 1 *regardless* of the fact that for a lot of journeys
orbital routes avoiding Zone 1 are now feasible. The DLR and
Overground have facilitated a lot of that extra choice.

I, for one, would object enormously to be charged via Zone 1 when I'd
never been through the centre! If I *do* go via Zone 1 then fair
enough I'll pay the extension fare but at least I've decided to do
that rather than some system imposing it on me even when I have *not*
been via Zone. If I need to tap a pink reader to stay in the rule set
then that's OK, if a little tiresome.

I came up against that at Willesden Junction when the new
inter-platform route was opened; I used it but there is no pink reader
there and no warning that it must be used. There was no way that I
could have got from Stonebridge Park to Kew in the time taken if I had
gone via Zone 1 but neither LOR nor TfL were interested in putting
things right.

Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off
 

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 08:51:18PM +0100, Richard wrote:

* Have it absolutely made certain that a barrier cannot open with the
card in an inconsistent state;

That can't be done until NR stations gain the ability to fix Oyster card
problems. It might also be incompatible with the desire to close tube
ticket offices.

No, I don't care why NR stations can't do this.

* Improve displays where possible to more easily see what is going on;

A very hard problem. Given that part of the idea behind Oyster is that
it gets people through the barrier area quicker than paper tickets,
they've constrained themselves to getting that information across in an
astonishingly short amount of time. It takes an appreciable fraction of
a second to move your gaze to a display and focus on it enough to read a
few characters.

--
David Cantrell | Nth greatest programmer in the world

Wow, my first sigquoting! I feel so special now!
-- Dan Sugalski