London Banter - View Single Post - Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off

[email protected] · April 25th 14, 12:30 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article
,
(Recliner) wrote:

Yes, it's one of the mysteries of OSI, which was designed to benefit
users, but sometimes costs them for reasons that aren't instantly obvious.
I hadn't come across this variant before; more commonly, it attempts to
combine two fairly lengthy but legit journeys to create one that breaks
journey time limits, thus creating two (expensive) unresolved journeys. I
really think the algorithm in that case should be smarter, and it should
abort the attempted combination of multiple OSI journeys if it would lead
to unresolved compound journeys.

I agree. OSIs are nothing like as helpful as they are touted and should have
sanity checks. In fact any putative unresolved journey should be subject to
sanity checks for possibly legitimate journeys. I realise that may be
impossible for the original Oyster technology but the system is changing.
The helpline should be a lot more generous about refunds in the meantime.

--
Colin Rosenstiel