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Old April 28th 14, 01:05 PM posted to uk.transport.london
David Cantrell David Cantrell is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Oct 2006
Posts: 1,392
Default Oyster: still an unreliable rip-off

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 08:45:00PM +0100, Mrs. Invalid-Address wrote:

Now, when a card is rejected for any reason, there is a different bleep
and an error code is displayed ...


Bleeps that are impossible to distinguish from the constant bleeping of
the other gates nearby. Error codes that are very hard to see because
they're low contrast, low down, and may be obscured by the hand and arm
holding your card.

I'm not sure this is all the fault of Oyster ...


The user interface problems above most certainly are. You need a clear
signal that your gate, and not either of its neighbours, is saying "you
shall not pass". And even then people will still just walk into the
barriers, and then be let through by the person behind them, because
90+% of the time it works properly and so people aren't prepared to
stop, look, and only go if the gate opens.

That people seem to think that Oyster is a contactless system when in
fact you need to place the card flat on the reader for a non-negligible
time if you want to have any hope of it working reliably is, if not a
fault in the Oyster system, at least a fault in how it has been marketed
to users.

--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

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