Neil Williams wrote:
On Wednesday, 6 November 2013 23:59:35 UTC, Paul Corfield wrote:

Can you explain what you mean by "so much human intervention"? What
would be your example of a system or facility not requiring so much
intervention?

My aims perhaps differ from TfL's (with union pressure) given my
experience of German systems which are generally completely unstaffed
except drivers and the odd security guard, but I would have had a core
requirement that all ticket offices could be closed when the system was
fully implemented, and that it could fully replace paper tickets. This
wouldn't necessarily result in redundancies, but rather I would have
roving staff to assist in the use of ticket machines. I'd do the same
for the mainline, FWIW.

So, some examples of how I would have done it differently:-

1. No unresolved journeys. The way I would work this is the same way as
many other systems do it, such as Singapore - touching in charges the
maximum Oyster single fare to the card that could apply from that station
(subject to cap if appropriate for London), and touching out refunds back
the difference back to the journey you actually made. If you don't touch
out, you don't get it back, tough. That is powerful motivation, and far,
far less complicated.

But isn't that exactly what Oyster does?

2. OSIs (out of station interchanges) seem to be the biggest cause of
this. I've posted about ways these could be tidied up before - one way
is to always close the journey on touching out, but reopen it when
touching back in at an OSI location. Leaving journeys open was a silly
piece of design again asking for a need for intervention.

But isn't that exactly what Oyster does?

3. All card transactions, be that dispensing, refunding or whatever,
possible ONLY from automated ticket machines, NOT from ticket offices.

Well, that's probably going to happen. Most suburban ticket offices are
already open only for very limited periods, and the plan is apparently to
close them altogether.