On 10/10/2014 01:05, Theo Markettos wrote:

Mizter T wrote:
Something that can help one out of a 'not enough money on my Oyster' fix
is the new 'one more journey' feature of Oyster (introduced shortly
before buses went cashless) - basically you can make one more journey
even if you don't have enough money on your Oyster (so currently £1.45),
you just need a positive balance or a zero balance:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/modes/buses/cash-free-buses#on-this-page-1

That is useful. Do Bad Things happen if I don't clear my negative balance
for 6 months (my next trip to London, for instance)?

No, Bad Things will not happen if a card is left with a negative balance
(apart from you being annoyed that you used your 'get out of jail free'
card last time, when perhaps you were counting on it again!).


Coming back to the earlier point of this thread, I agree with you that
auto-topup means one can neatly sidestep all such top-up worries. The
only point to make is that it's not for everyone - for instance, some
people's finances are incredibly finely balanced, and £20 being taken
from their bank account at an inopportune moment can lead to all sorts
of problems.

I agree, and I don't actually do autotopup because it's too much hassle for
an occasional visitor, and I find it more useful to say to people 'oh,
you're visiting London? Borrow my Oystercard' without risking anything more
than the balance on my card.

Auto top-up is a bit of a faff to set up, and cancelling it (should one
wish to) needs you to do the same as setting it up - nominate a station
and make a journey starting or ending there within the next 8 (I think)
days.

Also I think it's possible to end up in a bit of a pickle should one get
a new debit/credit card having had the previous one lost or stolen, and
not update TfL with the details of the new one - if you use the Oyster
and it gets auto topped-up, and thus owe TfL money, they're very keen on
you giving them the new credit/debit card details pronto (within 3 days
I think), else they'll hotlist the Oyster card (which results in it
being permanently nuked if an attempt is made to use it).

In message , at 09:56:08 on Fri, 10 Oct
2014, Mizter T remarked:

Auto top-up is a bit of a faff to set up, and cancelling it (should one
wish to) needs you to do the same as setting it up - nominate a station
and make a journey starting or ending there within the next 8 (I think)
days.

Also I think it's possible to end up in a bit of a pickle should one
get a new debit/credit card having had the previous one lost or stolen,
and not update TfL with the details of the new one - if you use the
Oyster and it gets auto topped-up, and thus owe TfL money, they're very
keen on you giving them the new credit/debit card details pronto
(within 3 days I think), else they'll hotlist the Oyster card (which
results in it being permanently nuked if an attempt is made to use it).

And if you got a new Barclays OnePulse card (even a routine replacement)
that had a different Oyster Card number, so you had to ring them up to
transfer the balance and the auto-topup, but I don't think you had to
re-active the auto-topup. All ancient history now of course.
--
Roland Perry

On 10/10/2014 10:11, Roland Perry wrote:
[...]
And if you got a new Barclays OnePulse card (even a routine replacement)
that had a different Oyster Card number, so you had to ring them up to
transfer the balance and the auto-topup, but I don't think you had to
re-active the auto-topup. All ancient history now of course.

That would have required Barclaycard to send out some replacement cards
with auto top-up enabled, and others without it, to the correct
customers - given how they kept their distance from the Oyster side of
things, I wonder if that was really the case, or whether you perhaps
misremember?

I was never very impressed with the OnePulse card - functionally, it was
just a plastic card that co-hosted two quite separate things, a
contactless credit card and an Oyster card. (Technically it was a bit
more than that, as the EMV contactless bit had to play nice with the
Oyster/Mifare bit.)

There were plans for London Borough library cards with integrated Oyster
cards - and perhaps few might have actually been issued, I'm not sure -
but again (according to the documentation I saw for them) it was
basically a plastic card hosting two quite separate functions - library
borrower details with a barcode printed on the front, with Oyster/Mifare
innards - and if you had any problems with the Oyster bit you had to
deal with TfL.

These days most Boroughs (and councils elsewhere) don't manage to
combine their library cards and leisure cards.

On 2014-10-10 10:08:58 +0000, Mizter T said:

I was never very impressed with the OnePulse card - functionally, it
was just a plastic card that co-hosted two quite separate things, a
contactless credit card and an Oyster card. (Technically it was a bit
more than that, as the EMV contactless bit had to play nice with the
Oyster/Mifare bit.)

A card for its time, I think. Of course, the EMV bit can do the Oyster
bit now, so there would be little point.

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

In article ,
(Theo Markettos) wrote:

Do Bad Things happen if I don't clear my negative balance
for 6 months (my next trip to London, for instance)?

No. At least I hope not as I'm expecting a large refund on that card later
this month having been in the red since 2012.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 11:55:00AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
On 2014-10-08 10:43:02 +0000, David Cantrell said:
CR7 8JH
Thornton Heath station ticket machine? And in the other case Victoria station?
I thought the point was to provide them where the railway/Tube doesn't.

The railway doesn't provide them. AFAIK ticket machines won't sell you a
new Oyster card, but Ticket Stops are supposed to. And anyway, if having
a station nearby was good enough, then surely ticket stops would have
never existed near any tube station.

--
David Cantrell | semi-evolved ape-thing

"IMO, the primary historical significance of Unix is that it marks the
time in computer history where CPUs became so cheap that it was possible
to build an operating system without adult supervision."
-- Russ Holsclaw in a.f.c

In message , at 11:08:58 on Fri, 10 Oct
2014, Mizter T remarked:

On 10/10/2014 10:11, Roland Perry wrote:
[...]
And if you got a new Barclays OnePulse card (even a routine replacement)
that had a different Oyster Card number, so you had to ring them up to
transfer the balance and the auto-topup, but I don't think you had to
re-active the auto-topup. All ancient history now of course.

That would have required Barclaycard to send out some replacement cards
with auto top-up enabled, and others without it, to the correct
customers - given how they kept their distance from the Oyster side of
things, I wonder if that was really the case, or whether you perhaps
misremember?

It's possible I had to re-enable auto-topup, now you mention it. I think
I specified the "wrong" gateline at the KGX/StP concourse and thus
ensued a merry dance.

I was never very impressed with the OnePulse card - functionally, it
was just a plastic card that co-hosted two quite separate things, a
contactless credit card and an Oyster card. (Technically it was a bit
more than that, as the EMV contactless bit had to play nice with the
Oyster/Mifare bit.)

Reduces card-bloat.

There were plans for London Borough library cards with integrated
Oyster cards - and perhaps few might have actually been issued, I'm not
sure - but again (according to the documentation I saw for them) it was
basically a plastic card hosting two quite separate functions - library
borrower details with a barcode printed on the front, with
Oyster/Mifare innards - and if you had any problems with the Oyster bit
you had to deal with TfL.

These days most Boroughs (and councils elsewhere) don't manage to
combine their library cards and leisure cards.

Nottingham does

http://www.citycardnottingham.co.uk/...-citycard.html

and they've had Smartcards on the buses for a decade. Oddly enough I
think the Nottingham Building Society was the first to introduce online
banking (on Prestel, it's that long ago).
--
Roland Perry

On 10/10/2014 12:07, David Cantrell wrote:

On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 11:55:00AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
On 2014-10-08 10:43:02 +0000, David Cantrell said:
CR7 8JH
Thornton Heath station ticket machine? And in the other case Victoria station?
I thought the point was to provide them where the railway/Tube doesn't.

The railway doesn't provide them. AFAIK ticket machines won't sell you a
new Oyster card, but Ticket Stops are supposed to. And anyway, if having
a station nearby was good enough, then surely ticket stops would have
never existed near any tube station.


FWIW, Tube TVMs are now equipped to 'sell' Oyster cards.

The commission that the TOCs must have missed out on by not being able
to do top-ups at ticket offices must be significant.

On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 12:24:36PM +0100, Someone Somewhere wrote:
On 08/10/2014 11:43, David Cantrell wrote:
On Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 10:36:00PM +0100, Theo Markettos wrote:
I suspect few non-Londoners use Ticket Stops or would know where to
find the nearest.
Lemme go and check again ...
Haha, http://ticketstoplocator.tfl.gov.uk/LocationLocator/ says that
there are no ticket stops anywhere near where I live (CR7 8JH) or work
(E1 6QL) or near Victoria station (SW1E 5ND). If TfL can't find the
damned things, god help any tourist foolish enough to try to use one.
Yeah - it appears to be broken, go here and try again:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/maps/oyster-ti....5217056274414

I'm not so familiar with where all the little shops are near work, but
if I put my home postcode into that, it shows a few. They're all in the
wrong places though.

(Google still picks up the website you indicated, but navigating the
"new" TfL website takes you to the link I've supplied)

So I repeat, god help any tourist foolish enough to try to use one.
People find things via google, not by going to the home page of a web
site and clicking on random links until they find what they want.
Especially tourists who probably don't even know that TfL is the company
they want or that it lives at tfl.gov.uk.

--
David Cantrell | semi-evolved ape-thing

I think the most difficult moment that anyone could face is seeing
their domestic servants, whether maid or drivers, run away
-- Abdul Rahman Al-Sheikh, writing on 25 Jan 2004 at
http://archive.arabnews.com/?article=38558

On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 10:42:17PM +0100, Mizter T wrote:
On 08/10/2014 11:43, David Cantrell wrote:
A few years back, when people here were incorrectly claiming that Oyster
was great despite it not really being available south of the river (and
note that it's *still* not fully available), [...]
By this I'm guessing you might be referring to two things - (a) that
nearly all (non-LO) rail ticket offices can't handle Oyster
transactions, and (b) rail TVMs don't show Oyster journey histories?

Yes.

--
David Cantrell | Pope | First Church of the Symmetrical Internet

Godliness is next to Englishness