On 16/08/2010 16:33, Paul Terry wrote:
In message , Paul Scott
writes

I read somewhere that for speed of introduction they'd bought an off
the shelf system exactly as used in another city somewhere.

The Bixi system, as introduced in Montreal last year.

But while the docking stations are virtually identical to the Bixi ones,
it looks to me as though the pay stations have been redesigned for London:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mo...ay_Station.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/celesteh/4843798568/

But many media reports have already indicated that Oyster readers will
be retrofitted.

Yes, there has been a vague statement to that effect, although other
reports state the opposite:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07...ke_hire_delay/

In any case, it seems needlessly extravagant to retrofit if the pay
stations have already been redesigned for TfL. After all, the hardware
could have been built-in but left switched-off until TfL were ready to
offer Oyster usage.

I still think there are great problems in allowing payment by Oyster -
the Oyster card will have to be registered and linked to a bank account
in order to retrieve the potential £300 for a non-returned bike. This
adds a whole new level of complexity to Oyster - especially for tourists
- since there is no way to visually differentiate between registered and
non-registered Oyster cards.


But you would need to register the Oystercard for cycle hire and it
would have to be linked to your account?