On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 10:49:07AM -0500, wrote:

The trouble is that auto top-up is still only really for regular users,

OP is a regular user.

unless you like TfL to hold many month's worth of travel as advance payments.

Sure. If 20 quid will break the bank, then you'll have to do things the
old-fashioned inconvenient way.

--
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age

Suffer the little children to come unto me, as
their buying habits are most easily influenced.
-- Marketroid Jesus

On 2016-04-11 22:15:57 +0000, Paul Corfield said:

From my limited observations there are now quite severe problems on
buses. They struggle to read any card first time with people having to
retouch their cards so that the reader has a chance of determining
what type of card it is communicating with and then deciding the
transaction that has to be undertaken. I think it is worst for those
using phone based technology but that's just based on reading other
people's experiences.

I don't know about Apple Pay, but I have not had problems using a
contactless credit card on TfL services. I think one of the problems
may be that they do take longer to process than Oyster cards - you have
to hold it there until you get the beep - and it's easy to pull away
too quickly.

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

On 12/04/2016 17:21, Neil Williams wrote:

On 2016-04-11 22:15:57 +0000, Paul Corfield said:

From my limited observations there are now quite severe problems on
buses. They struggle to read any card first time with people having to
retouch their cards so that the reader has a chance of determining
what type of card it is communicating with and then deciding the
transaction that has to be undertaken. I think it is worst for those
using phone based technology but that's just based on reading other
people's experiences.

I don't know about Apple Pay, but I have not had problems using a
contactless credit card on TfL services. I think one of the problems
may be that they do take longer to process than Oyster cards - you have
to hold it there until you get the beep - and it's easy to pull away too
quickly.


Agreed, I haven't had any problems using contactless which is my main
method nowadays. Well, I would agree with Paul that I think the bus
validators seem to struggle somewhat - a second 'touch' is sometimes
necessary. This is on contrast to retailers POS machines, which hardly
ever miss the first 'touch'.

An aside - "contactless" isn't a great name for the technology, as it's
best if you do actually make contact / touch the card on the reader.