Adrian wrote:

So - when WILL the official licenced busker pitches be equipped with Oyster
readers, so you can use your prepay credit to donate to them?

Singapore already makes that possible - their Oyster-equivalent cards
(ezLink) can be touched against charitable donation machines in shopping
centres. There was a video playing saying how great the chairty was,
and then touchpads for donating $1, $5 and $10 from your ezLink card.

ezLink isn't really comparable to Oyster though, it works as you'd
expect, and works first time. It also gives you credit/discount for
using interconnecting public transport services (ie if you took a bus to
your MRT/tube station, took the tube/MRT, then a bus from the
destination station to your final destination, the bus + train + bus
journey would cost less than a single train and two single bus journeys
alone.

On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:30:31 GMT, Robinson
wrote:

ezLink isn't really comparable to Oyster though, it works as you'd
expect, and works first time. It also gives you credit/discount for
using interconnecting public transport services (ie if you took a bus to
your MRT/tube station, took the tube/MRT, then a bus from the
destination station to your final destination, the bus + train + bus
journey would cost less than a single train and two single bus journeys
alone.

That this isn't the case is a fault of London's fare structure and not
Oyster per-se. In most of Germany's Verkehrsverbuende in the major
cities, there is one public transport fare, not a bus, tram or train
fare.

You pay one single, and it is valid by as many modes for as many
changes as required to make your journey. Indeed, because of how the
bus services are structured, it is rare to be able to do a journey by
one mode. There may be a short-distance single as well, but there
isn't a discount for only using the bus like there effectively is in
London.

The difference, I guess, is that most European U- and S-Bahn systems
are not well over capacity like LUL is, so there is less of a reason
to want to shy people away from rail and onto bus for journeys that
are really too long or too slow for a city bus.

Neil

--
Neil Williams in Milton Keynes, UK
To e-mail use neil at the above domain

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Fustanella wrote:

The solution seems simple: require buskers to use only defective Oyster
cards, thus preventing them from blocking ped traffic within the system.

But surely that's the majority of the cards?

tom

--
But in natural sciences whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself. -- Galileo