Richard M Willis wrote:
Yebbut if you get caught not touching in, you may end up with a £20
Penalty Fare. That might not be 'best'...

Do you have to touch in if you are using a travelcard, rather than
PrePay ? I thought it was only PP users who had to touch all over the
place ?

Only PAYG users need to touch in. An Oyster travelcard is the same as a
paper card - it will open barriers where needed, and must be presented
to a revenue inspector for reading, but that's it.

However, if you have an Oyster travelcard and go out-of-zone without
previously having touched in, you can be issued with a £20 PF (eg if I
get on the Victoria Line at unbarriered Finsbury Park with a Z12 and
without touching in, and then head to Walthamstow).

So technically, the "always touch in and out for the best fare" advice
does apply people with Oyster travelcards as well, I guess...


Can't someone come up with a better verb than "touch" ?

"hold near"?

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:35:51 +0100, Dave Arquati wrote:

With Oyster there is this new scenario that hasn't as far as I can see
occured before in transport ticketing - to have a valid ticket fore the
whole journey a passenger must perform the correct action at the end of
that journey i.e. touching out. Obviously when a stations automatic
gates are in operation enforcing this is easy, but otherwise it relies
on the passenger doing the right thing.

These are problems that will come to the fore when Oyster is
implemented across National Rail in London, given that number of
ungated stations.

Indeed. I imagine the solution will be to make sure that touching in and
out is always in the user's best interest, and this will probably be
achieved by combining "refund-at-exit" as you mention (i.e. charging a
higher fare at entry and refunding if necessary at exit) with the
lock-ups of users' cards if too many unresolved journeys occur (as
mentioned below).

And, as has been mentioned, that's what happens on NR at the moment.
AIUI, £5.00 is quite literally deducted from your pre-pay balance as
soon as you touch in at Marylebone, Euston, Liverpool Street, or
Fenchurch Street NR. The difference between that and the correct fare
is then refunded when (if!) you get off at a station pre-pay is valid
to, and touch out on a reader there.

Dave - where you say above if you don't touch in/out this "may prevent
you from using your card (thus losing your deposit if you don't top
up)" what do you mean? From what I've seen unresolved journeys don't
lock up someones card, not yet at least.

This is just from hearsay, but I think *multiple* unresolved journeys
prevent the card from working.

In the early months of pre-pay, when querying an unresolved journey at
a Tube ticket office, I was told that if you picked up too many
unresolved journeys (without getting them sorted out by the Helpline),
your card would/might* stop working. I don't know of any reports of it
actually happening though.

*I can't remember his exact words; perhaps he was just speculating.

The cheapest fare is the cheapest valid ticket for your journey. If you
don't have a valid ticket at all and don't intend to obtain one, you are
essentially a thief!

You could equally accuse Tesco of false advertising for saying that
their baked beans are cheaper than any other place's - Sainsbury's baked
beans are "free" if you shoplift them.

A strong point that essentially deals with the original question -
though the original poster was welcome in pondering on the language
used by LU and sharing his thoughts here.

True, it was just that the original poster's language implied that
fare-dodging was the desirable course of action, rather than merely a
possible one ("you should not swipe in..." rather than "you *could*
avoid swiping in"...). Probably just my over-reaction!

Perhaps he meant "best" fare as in the best of all possible fares that
could theoretically exist, rather than just the actual ones in the
table in the fares leaflet. Which would of course be £0.00 (at least
from the passenger's point of view, though perhaps not from the
taxpayer's). ;-)

Richard M Willis wrote:
"Helen Deborah Vecht" wrote in message

Yebbut if you get caught not touching in, you may end up with a £20
Penalty Fare. That might not be 'best'...

Do you have to touch in if you are using a travelcard, rather than
PrePay ? I thought it was only PP users who had to touch all over the
place ?

You need not touch in or out if you have a Travelcard loaded on your
Oyster that is valid for the entire journey. However if you're going to
travel out-of-zone on the Underground - i.e. go beyond the zones that
are covered by your Travelcard - then you'll need to ensure you
touch-in at the beginning of your journey, and touch-out at the end.
This is because you are combining the Travelcard with the Oyster
Pre-Pay function (the Pre-Pay function provides the ticket extension
for your out-of-zone travels).


An example - if you have a zones 1&2 Travelcard loaded on your Oyster
and normally travel from Olympia (an ungated station) to Temple on the
District line, there's no need to touch-in at the start of your
journey.

But if one day you were to travel out to Upminster (in zone 6), you
should touch-in at the start of your journey (on the Oyster readers at
Olympia) so when you get to Upminster the system knows where you've
come from and charges you accordingly (for the journey from zone 2 to
zone 6). If you didn't touch in, then as soon as you gott out of Zones
1 or 2 you'd be travelling without a valid ticket and subject to a
Penalty Fare.

If however you were to travel from Olympia up to Harrow & Wealdstone on
the direct National Rail Southern service, as Pre-Pay is not valid on
that route you'd need to buy a paper ticket extension to cover you from
the boundary of zone 2 up to H&W.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

Mizter T wrote:
Dave Arquati wrote:
Alan OBrien wrote:
There are posters on the Underground which say that people should always
swipe in and out so as to get the best fare.
If by 'best' they mean cheapest they are wrong.
Surely if you have the chance you should either not swipe in or swipe out,
or both.
If you do neither, then you do not have a valid ticket and are
deliberately trying to avoid the fare, rendering you liable for either a
penalty fare or prosecution. If you deliberately don't touch in or out,
then the same presumably applies.

With Oyster there is this new scenario that hasn't as far as I can see
occured before in transport ticketing - to have a valid ticket fore the
whole journey a passenger must perform the correct action at the end of
that journey i.e. touching out. Obviously when a stations automatic
gates are in operation enforcing this is easy, but otherwise it relies
on the passenger doing the right thing.

I believe there are some commuter type bus opperations somewhere (US, I
think), where in the evening peak, everyone boards at the start, and
pays their fare as they alight, so that the huge queue to pay on
boarding is avoided (because you all board together, but alight along a
spread out route).

Robin

"Mizter T" wrote in message You need not touch in or
out if you

However if you're going to
travel out-of-zone on the Underground - i.e. go beyond the zones that
are covered by your Travelcard - then you'll need to ensure you
touch-in at the beginning of your journey, and touch-out at the end.
This is because you are combining the Travelcard with the Oyster
Pre-Pay function (the Pre-Pay function provides the ticket extension
for your out-of-zone travels).

I wonder how this works for those situations where the "official"
routing for a journey involves zone 1, but you want to do it without
going through zone 1.

I had someone from Oyster explain to me the other day that Oyster
fares don't necessarily follow zonal conventions. She gave the example
of traveling from Saint John's Wood to South Ealing, saying that "The
System"
assumed such a journey would be made through zone 1, even if you managed
to do it without going through zone 1.

She said that if you have a Z2345 travelcard and you travel from SJW to SE
via
the Jub/Metro and Rayner's Lane lines, you need to pay for zone 1 even
though you
don't use it.

This seems to throw up a contradiction:
a) if you have a Z2345 TC, you don't have to touch in/out so if you go that
route you have a valid ticket all the way.
b) if you have a Z2345 TC and *do* touch in/out, Oyster will charge you
for a zone 1 journey which you don't have on your TC, so will take it out
of your PP balance.

This doesn't seem right to me.
Can anyone else explain how zones and Oyster PP interact ? It seems as if
it hasn't been throught through properly.

Richard [in SG19]



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Richard M Willis wrote:
"Mizter T" wrote in message You need not touch in or
out if you

However if you're going to
travel out-of-zone on the Underground - i.e. go beyond the zones that
are covered by your Travelcard - then you'll need to ensure you
touch-in at the beginning of your journey, and touch-out at the end.
This is because you are combining the Travelcard with the Oyster
Pre-Pay function (the Pre-Pay function provides the ticket extension
for your out-of-zone travels).

I wonder how this works for those situations where the "official"
routing for a journey involves zone 1, but you want to do it without
going through zone 1.

I had someone from Oyster explain to me the other day that Oyster
fares don't necessarily follow zonal conventions. She gave the example
of traveling from Saint John's Wood to South Ealing, saying that "The
System"
assumed such a journey would be made through zone 1, even if you managed
to do it without going through zone 1.

First and obvious point - most people would not choose to go that way.
I certainly wouldn't advise that as a route! But it's an interesting
academic question.

She said that if you have a Z2345 travelcard and you travel from SJW to SE
via
the Jub/Metro and Rayner's Lane lines, you need to pay for zone 1 even
though you
don't use it.

I think it's fair enough for the system designers to assume that with
this example the route taken would be via zone 1 on the Central Line. I
guess if you did want to go via Rayner's Lane then you can ensure you
don't pay for zone 1 by exiting and re-entering the station via the
gates - thus ensuring the system knows what you're doing.


This seems to throw up a contradiction:
a) if you have a Z2345 TC, you don't have to touch in/out so if you go that
route you have a valid ticket all the way.
b) if you have a Z2345 TC and *do* touch in/out, Oyster will charge you
for a zone 1 journey which you don't have on your TC, so will take it out
of your PP balance.

In reply to (a) at St John's Wood you'd be forced to touch-in most of
the time as you'd have to go through the gates. If so, then exit and
re-enter at Rayner's Lane. If the gates are open, you could *not*
touch-in and continue to travel via Rayner's Lane legitimately.

In reply to (b) - that's because of the assumption built into the
system, which in the case of the example given is, as I've said
already, fair enough!


This doesn't seem right to me.
Can anyone else explain how zones and Oyster PP interact ? It seems as if
it hasn't been throught through properly.

I think the system has been thought through in a very detailed way, and
any assumptions it makes would be regarded as reasonable by most
people.

The potential complexity comes when Oyster Pre-Pay is implemented
London-wide on National Rail (NR). The possible issues here would be
similar to the above, where an A to B journey could go via C or D where
changing at D might be a slower but cheaper route than changing at C -
(similar to the 'route -not London' tickets that are already sold by
NR). The solution I guess would be to have Oyster readers at the
station that passengers must touch whilst they change trains. The
difficulty comes in trying to communicate this simply to passengers.

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:06:54 +0100, Richard M Willis wrote:

She said that if you have a Z2345 travelcard and you travel from SJW to SE
via the Jub/Metro and Rayner's Lane lines, you need to pay for zone 1 even
though you don't use it.

You can avoid paying for Z1 by leaving and re-entering the station at
Rayners Lane. (You have to walk past the gateline when changing trains
there anyway.) This effectively splits your journey into two journeys,
each of which is charged at the Z2-6/Z3-6 rate.

This seems to throw up a contradiction:
a) if you have a Z2345 TC, you don't have to touch in/out so if you go that
route you have a valid ticket all the way.
b) if you have a Z2345 TC and *do* touch in/out, Oyster will charge you
for a zone 1 journey which you don't have on your TC, so will take it out
of your PP balance.

This doesn't seem right to me.

It is right, in the sense that it's correct. (Of course, it's arguably
not right if you mean in the moral sense.)

Can anyone else explain how zones and Oyster PP interact ?

Looks to me like you already have it sussed.

On 29 Jun 2006 09:33:49 -0700, Mizter T wrote:

I think the system has been thought through in a very detailed way, and
any assumptions it makes would be regarded as reasonable by most
people.

The potential complexity comes when Oyster Pre-Pay is implemented
London-wide on National Rail (NR). The possible issues here would be
similar to the above, where an A to B journey could go via C or D where
changing at D might be a slower but cheaper route than changing at C -
(similar to the 'route -not London' tickets that are already sold by
NR).

At first I thought so too; but the more I think about this, the less
convinced I am that it would really be a problem (at least, no more so
than it currently is with the Tube).

Most of the time, the choice is between a faster route via Z1 or a
slower route avoiding it; but with NR, you almost always have to pass
through a barrier when crossing Z1 (assuming they put some in at
Waterloo; then I think FCC would be the only exception). So the system
would be able to know whether you went via Z1 or not.

Can you think of a concrete example on NR where there would really be
a problem? (I'm struggling to think of one where the "cheaper" route
isn't ridiculously slow.)

"John B" wrote in message
ups.com...
Richard M Willis wrote:
Yebbut if you get caught not touching in, you may end up with a £20
Penalty Fare. That might not be 'best'...

Do you have to touch in if you are using a travelcard, rather than
PrePay ? I thought it was only PP users who had to touch all over the
place ?

Only PAYG users need to touch in.

The Conditions of Carriage state that "When you use London Underground and
National Rail services, you must touch your Oyster card on the reader at
both the start and the end of your journey. Where the ticket gates at
stations are open you must continue to touch your Oyster card on the
reader."



That goes for all Oyster cards, prepay and season tickets.

"Mizter T" wrote in message
ups.com...
Richard M Willis wrote:
"Helen Deborah Vecht" wrote in message

Yebbut if you get caught not touching in, you may end up with a £20
Penalty Fare. That might not be 'best'...

Do you have to touch in if you are using a travelcard, rather than
PrePay ? I thought it was only PP users who had to touch all over the
place ?

You need not touch in or out if you have a Travelcard loaded on your
Oyster that is valid for the entire journey.

The Conditions of Carriage state that "When you use London Underground and
National Rail services, you must touch your Oyster card on the reader at
both the start and the end of your journey. Where the ticket gates at
stations are open you must continue to touch your Oyster card on the
reader."



That is all Oyster cards.