London Banter - View Single Post - TfL acknowledges contactless technology risk

[email protected] · June 26th 14, 05:32 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Mizter T) wrote:

On 26/06/2014 15:52, wrote:
[...]
The big gain is not having to visit a ticket office or ticket machine.
e-Tickets and Print-at-Home do that too. If you've seen the ticket
office/machine queues at Cambridge at times (Saturday morning is often
worst) you'd see why such options are needed.

For the avoidance of talking at cross purposes, you're referring to
being able to use a CPC to directly pay for your journey (i.e. using
it to touch-in at the start, and touch-out at the end) - the
Merseyrail scheme is just about using contactless for the retail
transaction of buying a conventional paper ticket.

And yes, I'm very well aware of that big gain - Oyster offers it, to
a significant extent. You need to have credit on your Oyster card
(which can be guaranteed if one opts-in to auto-topup), but being
able to arrive at the station a minute or so before a train and just
being able to touch-in without faffing around buying a ticket has
been nigh-on revolutionary for many travellers in London.

(For the Cambridge example and similar, this is where being able to
buy a ticket for loading onto an ITSO smartcard online - via a
smartphone whilst on the go, for example - and so being able to
sidestep the queues and just swipe-in at the station should prove
very useful.)

You've more or less got it. Cambridge has high internet ticket sales but
they all have to be collected from the same TVMs as have large queues of
people buying tickets at present. Even though some TOC, e.g. Cross Country
do Print-at-Home it doesn't seem to be possible for journeys from Cambridge.

Things should be better after a major ticket office expansion later this
year but if they could divert more ticketing transactions from the station
it would be better still.

--
Colin Rosenstiel