On 02/01/2014 16:24, tim...... wrote:

If TfL are expecting your average foreign tourist to start paying for
tickets using "pay wave" credit cards I think that they are tilting at
windmills

I walk from St.Pancras to King's Cross tube station quite frequently and
continue to be surprised at the number of arrivals from Eurostar who
head straight to the enormously long queue for the ticket office, when
there are plenty of ticket machines with no queue or only a small one.

It could be that some of them are conditioned by the near impossibility
of using ticket machines at stations in France (and for that matter in
the Netherlands) if you are a non-native. I recall arriving at the RER
station in Charles de Gaulle a few years ago and finding that the ticket
machines accepted neither UK credit cards nor Euro notes. I was able to
avoid the extremely long queue only by being able to feed in at least
two dozen small coins (which fortunately I had left over from a previous
trip).

You only have to look at the number of suitably "qualified" individuals
who don't go through the self service passport check (at no risk and
sometimes considerable time cost) to see how "frightened" the average
person is of such technology

Well my experience of these things at airports is that they only
recognise my face or iris about one time out of three, and that if it
fails I have to queue up for the manned barrier anyway after a few
minutes, so that on average there is little or no time saving. It's
nothing to do with "fright": if the technology gets better maybe more of
us will use them. I'm told that the new-fangled facial recognition
systems are slightly better than the old iris scanners, but my
experience has not provided me with much evidence of that so far.

--
Clive Page