On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 01:00:11PM +0100, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 12:25:34
on Tue, 9 Sep 2014, David Cantrell remarked:
I've been using Oyster PAYG instead of a paper travelcard for the last
few months. I don't trust it, so check my journey history every morning.
I find that it has screwed up, on average, once a week. And only once
has it screwed up in my favour by completely missing a journey. Every
other time it overcharged me.
You've confirmed what a lot of people only suspected.

I thought it was widely known. It's certainly come up in Stuff at city
hall.

I was particularly impressed by the time I touched out at Victoria
(District line), the gates failed to open, but it registered the touch
out anyway and the gate refused to recognise me trying again. The gate
next door did though, and despite that gate line having been exit only
for the last twenty years, it registered a touch *in* when it let me
out. My journey history then has another touch in two minutes later at
the BR station. So it goes ...

18:33: touch in at Aldgate East
18:53: touch out at Victoria (district line)
18:54: touch in at Victoria (exit-only gateline; no subsequent touch out)
18:56: touch in at Victoria BR
19:25: touch out at Thornton Heath

You have to be a really special kind of stupid to charge me for three
trips there, but they did. You have to be a really special kind of
stupid to not flag supposed concurrent journeys on the same card for
some kind of review.

I can pretty much guarantee you that there will be *lots* of false
positives. Probably more than with plain old Oyster, because if people
are paying with their bank card they won't think it necessary to sign up
for an account in an obscure corner of the TfL website and to check it
religiously.
And with Oyster there's at least the chance that you can see your
balance disappearing, if you know exactly where to look on a gate for
the fraction of a second it displays the number.

And if you know what the various numbers mean, and if you can see them
anyway, and if you remember what your balance is, and if you can hold
the Byzantine fare structure in your head and so extract meaning from
the random numbers.

In good Oystery news, they appear to have finally learned how to make a
website properly, and the journey history now doesn't require that you
use Firefox.

--
David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age

The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons