On 7 Jan 2004, Steph Davies wrote:

Here's an idea for a workaround though, which simply involves
maintaining a prepay balance and a tweak to the system.

Let's say my oystercard expires and using the website I purchase a
Travelcard, to start on Monday. On Monday morning I take a bus to my
designated station, and the fare for that journey is deducted from my
prepay balance. Upon arriving at my designated station, the Travelcard I
purchased is downloaded to my oystercard BUT the bus fare is also
credited back to my prepay balance, as I had already bought a ticket to
cover it.

Could it work?

I don't see why not.

Now, in the "Oyster at Finsbury Park" thread, Martin Rich said:

The really nice thing would be if Oyster could calculate, when the
season expires, whether it would have been cheaper simply to buy an
extra zone for the season, and charge me the cost of that extra zone...

Both of these suggestions are basically about an oyster which tracks your
usage, and then decides which ticket would have been cheapest (or in the
case of the Davies proposal, just goes with the ticket you asked for) and
issues it to you retrospectively. If this were done generally, it would be
rather good, and simple to use: you just travel, and get charged a monthly
(or whatever) direct debit. Essentially, a sort of pre-pay capping system
operating backwards in time.

I suppose the problem would be with people failing to pay their direct
debits; perhaps there could be some sort of substantial deposit to cover
that, which would be no worse than buying a ticket up-front today.

Also, you might find the problem was quite computationally complex if you
allowed the system to rewrite your ticket history arbitrarily; it might
sell you monthlies for ten months, and then decide that you would have
been better off with an annual, revoke the monthlies and issue one, refund
any difference (then ought to go back and see how much you'd have saved
through gold card discounts, but never mind), but if you travel for
another few months, it has to decide whether to issue an annual covering
the first year and a monthly covering the first month after, or a monthly
for the first month and an annual for the year after, taking in your
precise journey dates (so it can leave gaps between some tickets), and
more complex cases as there's a longer period to cover, plus variations in
prices over time, etc. Or perhaps if there are patches where you used
buses but not tubes, or tubes but not NR, it should cover them with a bus
pass or LT card.

Anyway, yes, basically, it would be nice if machines could do my thinking
for me.

tom

--
shouting drunkenly about 6502 assembler at parties