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

David Cantrell · April 28th 14, 12:50 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 01:26:55AM -0500, wrote:

Go through a gate that opens in front of you and discover the touch hasn't
been registered, giving an unresolved journey. My wife got two out of two
from King's Cross to Westminster and back in 2011.

That's happened to me twice in the last coupla weeks now. The first
time, TfL seem to have needed me to phone them, the second they seem to
have magically worked it out anyway despite it being far less obvious
what I actually did:

Thu 24 Apr
19:06 touch in, Aldgate East, cost: GBP5.10
19:23 touch out, Victoria tube, refund: GBP2.95
19:25 touch in, Victoria NR, cost: GBP2.95
[no touch out]

so my touch out at Thornton Heath went missing. But my journey history
says:

19:06 - ???? Aldgate East to [No touch-out], cost: GBP5.10

Which is apparently the right amount.

So they can figure out, presumably based on my previous journeys, that I
ended up at Thornton Heath, despite there being no record of this, and
despite it being entirely possible that I got off at, say, Clapham
Junction (which would have been cheaper) or East Croydon (which would
have been more expensive). That is, they can make educated guesses about
what I actually did when their* equipment failed.

But presented with a journey history like this:

Touch in Waterloo tube
[missing touch out]
Touch in Balham NR
Touch out Thornton Heath

They can't automagically figure out what is obvious - that I changed
trains at Balham, from the Northern line to Southern. That they can
resolve one of these but not the other makes no sense.

* let me pre-empt the annoying pedants and their "wah wah wah it's
Southern's equipment, not TfL's". I don't care. It's "the Oyster
system". You know, the thing marketed at us as being a single
single payment system made of unicorns and pixie dust.

--
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

Sobol's Law of Telecom Utilities:
Telcos are malicious; cablecos are simply clueless.