In message , at 21:12:14 on Wed, 17 Sep
2014, Mizter T remarked:
One question that occurs to me is whether railcard discounts will
be available with contactless cards if so, how?

Currently a bald "no". From the TfL FAQ:

"If you're eligible for discounted travel, you should carry on
using your existing Oyster card or Oyster photocard.

Discounts can't be added to contactless payment cards. This
includes all National Railcard discounts."

I thought so but wonder why. If the processing is all in the back
office why
can't railcards be associated with the accounts there? Or is that another
one of your apparently simple developments we'll have to wait for? :-)

It is indeed "apparently simple" About two lines of code could apply
such a discount to a suitably registered contactless account.

You'd need a solid system in place to verify that the payment card
holder really did hold a Railcard.

Then you'd need a solid system in place for RPIs and the like to be
informed that they should also checking for a valid Railcard.

Bit more than two lines of code there.

Actually, all that stuff is already needed for Oyster loaded with a
Railcard.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 21:14:48 on
Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:
I suspect the main issue is how, if people set up accounts on line,
TfL can possibly verify that someone saying they have a Railcard
actually does have one. I doubt there is any system to system link
between TfL and whatever system RSP have for railcards (if they even
have one!).

The way round that at present is that you physically present yourself
and your entitlement and a ticket clerk enters all the relevant
details. With a move to scrap ticket offices there has to be some way
of adding entitlement - and yes I know that is via a roving member of
staff logging on to a passenger machine and doing what the ticket
clerk currently does! However is anyone going to want to show a bank
card to a staff member to punch in to a ticket machine? I guess
someone could, at the relevant point in the process, stick their card
in the card reader so details are transferred electronically but it
all seems a dreadful faff.

The discount will be recorded on your TfL CPC online account. All that's
required is for you to present your Railcard to a member of staff, and
then have him record your card number on some manual handheld device. At
the end of the day transfer those numbers to the central system.

More elegantly, do one of these zero-pence "sales", but this time for a
"Railcard entitlement", which only the member of staff has the ability
to call up on the ticket machine.

I suspect discount entitlements will not move across to CPCs at all.
They'll remain on Oyster and later "dumb" Oyster with TfL simply
migrating the vast majority of entitlements as part of a card
"switchover" process when current Oyster is decommissioned (Phase 5 of
the Future Ticketing Project).

That sounds like you expect the Oyster entitlements *will* be migrated,
or am I misreading?
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 22:06:19 on Wed, 17 Sep
2014, Mizter T remarked:
(2) Using what (PCI DSS compliant) mechanism?

Huh? How does the suggestion I made differ from the current process which
records the entitlement on the Oyster card instead of in the back office?

The current process doesn't involve dealing with payment cards,
entering payment card information into a system and transmitting it
securely to a database. Once you start dealing with payment cards it's
a whole different scenario.

If you are worried about transmitting the card number then use the
customer's CPC account number instead (I presume that this institutional
paranoia about card numbers means it's not simply the card number).

Or use the card to buy a zero-pence "discount entitlement ticket" from a
machine (supervised by staff), at which point the mechanism already
exists to securely get the transaction sent to the right account in the
back office.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 21:41:18 on Wed, 17 Sep
2014, Mizter T remarked:
Is there a vague notion of when the current (value stored on card)
Oyster system might end up being decommissioned? (Is that the echo of
Mr Perry frenziedly chanting 'vapourware' I can hear?)

You really don't get the concept of vapourware, do you? It only applies
to products which are significantly pre-announced, and the eventual
outcome is either the product does appear (in which case it's off the
list) or the project is ignominiously[1] cancelled in which case it's
off the list again.

Whenever it is, it'll be a big endeavour, what with all the great many
'old system' Oyster cards out in the wild (in bedrooms in Hong Kong,
down the back of sofas in Leytonstone, forgotten about in seldom-used
overcoats in Sheffield etc) which people will want to exchange or
cash-in for years to come.

They've already withdrawn a whole tranche of Oysters (the Barclay
OnePulse variety) so they have some experience to go on. Although they
cheated slightly by transferring the balance to another Oyster. However
there's no reason they couldn't either credit the money to a newly
opened CPC TfL account, or even give you cash if you present the card to
a TVM (for years to come). I'd have to think about whether someone
should rightfully expect the return of their deposit as well, if they
are cashing in a discontinued Oyster.

[1] Well, potentially, often they just fade into obscurity if we don't
keep up the pressure. But if for example it's a type of new train ticket
and the TOC which was promising it loses the franchise, that creates a
pretty definite funeral for its prospects.
--
Roland Perry

On 2014-09-17 23:36:38 +0000, said:

But they ARE using contactless cards now. They add data to the back office
database to enable the card to be billed. Railcard status is just a bit of
status data to add in to the calculations. What's more complex?

Could they be looking to phase out the discount? I can't think of any
other joint-tariff system elsewhere that includes a discount for use of
a railcard-type product that has nothing to do with the operator of the
tariff system.

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

In message , at 21:21:03 on Wed, 17 Sep
2014, Mizter T remarked:

The vapour was the 2+ years that it was "coming soon".

2+ years? Well, if you want to be precise about your vapourware
allegation then at least get it right - contactless on buses was
initially announced for being in time for the Olympics (so July) but
actually arrived in December '12, then contactless on the rest of the
system was initially stated to be coming in "early 2013" ('early' in a
year doesn't have a defined meaning).

So let's say April 2013 - actually arrived September 2014. Difference
of a year and a half.

Are you saying that when they announced it for the buses for the
Olympics they didn't also say "and soon after that the tubes". Really?

Obviously, once such a product has beaten the odds and actually
appeared, it comes off the vapourware list.

"Beaten the odds" - what odds?

The odds that the product would every appear. To give TfL their due,
they aren't that bad about announcing things which *never* come to pass,
although I'm sure if we dug around a bit on the fringes we might find
something (maybe a fare structure for the dangleway that got scrapped
before it launched because the eventual sponsorship agreement made it
untenable, but I didn't actually follow everything that was said).

It wasn't heavily advertised to the public at large for years either.
Yes, there were vague, broad time scales on the relevant project page
of the TfL website that slipped, but (apart from people who take joy
in pointing out how rubbish everything is) people weren't waiting on
baited breath for it to appear.

TfL met their announced, specific , solid 'go-live' date of 16 September.

Except Boris promised a date last year, and others promised dates before
that.

Cite? I'm after a specific announcement of a date.

Probably the "early 2013" you mention above. Something doesn't need a
calendar date to enter the world of vapourware.

I can't be bothered to trawl back old announcements for Oyster (although
in the past I've posted chapter and verse for false-starts by ITSO on
Prestige).

But just for fun, from 13th May 2014:

"Kit Malthouse, the Deputy Mayor of London, announced today that
London’s entire transport network would accept contactless
payment cards by mid-July.

"Speaking at the 4th Smart City Event in Amsterdam, Malthouse
said that the new payment methods would be available across
London’s transport network "within two months’ time" after
extensive trials on the city’s bus network took place last
year."

But what's the doubling of a timescale between friends

Delayed (but working), not vapour.

The delay is what made it vapour.

Seems you expend a lot of vapour worrying about these things! I can't
remember hearing anyone else get quite so agitated/excited by it.

As someone from a product development background, where one of the
things you should always worried about is not just someone else beating
you to market, but also someone else convincing the public to wait for
their [fictional] product rather than buy yours, I've always had a keen
eye for it.

Latterly I've become interested in decoding (largely to be able to
predict when promises from government and the public sector will come to
fruition) phrases like "Late Summer".

This year it happens that the Parliamentary Summer Recess ended on 31st
August, so exceptionally their "late summer" (which means by the last
day of the recess) is the exactly same as the Met Office's, although
astronomers will say you'll have to wait another few days yet.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 08:41:03 on Thu, 18
Sep 2014, Neil Williams remarked:
But they ARE using contactless cards now. They add data to the back office
database to enable the card to be billed. Railcard status is just a bit of
status data to add in to the calculations. What's more complex?

Could they be looking to phase out the discount? I can't think of any
other joint-tariff system elsewhere that includes a discount for use of
a railcard-type product that has nothing to do with the operator of the
tariff system.

Discounts don't apply across the board (for example a 'student' card
doesn't give a discount on tube fares). However both contactless and
Oyster are usable on National Rail lines within the TfL area, so why
shouldn't people be able to get a discount if they have an appropriate
railcard?
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 23:45:46 on Wed, 17
Sep 2014, Neil Williams remarked:
Unless, like mine, the sort of bank cards issued on business accounts
aren't contactless-enabled.

My corporate Barclaycard *is* contactless and has been for ages.

Mine's a debit card, which probably makes a significant difference.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at
23:11:50 on Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Arthur Figgis
remarked:
On 17/09/2014 19:56, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at
19:32:32 on Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Arthur Figgis
remarked:
If I can by a coffee at Starbucks by waving a CPC, and it ends up on my
bill at the end of the month, it does seem as if waving a CPC at a gate
ought to register my presence with enough information to bill me
overnight once I've also registered a touch-out. But clearly it's all a
lot more complicated than that, given the kerfuffle to get it all in
place.

Because Starbucks knows how much to charge you before you wave your
card, but TfL doesn't know whether you will make more journeys today.

You've missed the point. The TfL gates "know" to charge you £0, and send
that message along with your location back to HQ. At the end of the day
someone looks at all the £0 charges and works out where you've been and
what non-zero charge to apply to the cardholder.

Which is only possible because TfL et al sat down and devised a system
of charging people £0.

That was done ages ago (long enough ago for people to expect to be able
to roll it out on buses in time for the Olympics). So having to work on
such a scheme is no reason for delays in tube rollout two years later.

Coffee shops don't tend to do that, they charge per transaction. I
rarely use Starbucks, but I'd be surprised if it tells a database
somewhere what drinks you have had each day and then the database
calculates the price at the end of the week.

I'm fairly sure there's a scheme they can subscribe to which is for want
of a better description a "stealth loyalty card" so they can track their
customers' behaviour. They might then use that data to help decide where
to open a new shop.

the terminals just have to desist from asking for a PIN if
they don't have a keyboard. That was sorted for acceptance on buses in
2012.

The Oyster terminals have presumably never been told to ask for PINs,

Obviously, that's part of the package that VISA (and others) agreed to.

but the contactless system apparently needed them.

For fraud prevention when people are buying mainly tangible assets.

TfL also controls all(?) the buses (and carries revenue risk?),

The financial impact of one person travelling for a day, for free, is
pretty low. It's not as if it costs TfL more to have one more bum on a
sea.

while DfT controls (most of) the trains and has to agree to the
contracts.

It's impossible to comprehend that DfT weren't in on the scheme from the
start.
--
Roland Perry

On 2014-09-18 07:45:23 +0000, Roland Perry said:

Discounts don't apply across the board (for example a 'student' card
doesn't give a discount on tube fares). However both contactless and
Oyster are usable on National Rail lines within the TfL area, so why
shouldn't people be able to get a discount if they have an appropriate
railcard?

I'm not saying they shouldn't - I'm just saying that everywhere else
I've looked at such things Railcards are a long-distance product only
and don't apply to local journeys within a joint-tariff area.

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