In message , at 15:41:38 on
Thu, 18 Sep 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:
More elegantly, do one of these zero-pence "sales", but this time for a
"Railcard entitlement", which only the member of staff has the ability
to call up on the ticket machine.

Yes but all of that involves staff intervention as the current system
does.

Only once a year per account. Sometimes there's a cost to doing
business, like the couple of minutes it takes to issue the railcard in
the first place.

Actually, if we take the £20 "3yr discount" for a Senior Railcard as
revenue neutral, it suggests the cost of issuing one is £10 (and the net
revenue they get £20/yr).

I suspect TfL would much prefer people using CPCs to have NO
requirement for staff intervention.

I'd prefer everyone ran their trains on time. We don't always get what
we want.

the key problem is avoiding fraud / misuse.

Yes, because everyone is nowadays guilty unless proved innocent. Chavs
rule.

I suspect discount entitlements will not move across to CPCs at all.
They'll remain on Oyster and later "dumb" Oyster with TfL simply
migrating the vast majority of entitlements as part of a card
"switchover" process when current Oyster is decommissioned (Phase 5 of
the Future Ticketing Project).

That sounds like you expect the Oyster entitlements *will* be migrated,
or am I misreading?

All I am suggesting is that *if* TfL decide to swap people from old
Oyster Cards to new ones it would be prudent for them to copy any /
all valid discount entitlements from the old card to the replacement
card (account).

Just for the duration of the current railcard, or for any subsequent
ones they buy?

Ideally this would be done with

...out..?

requiring people to queue for ten hours to get it done at a machine.

It is much harder to deal with the zillions of Oyster cards used as
spares / duplicates / for visitors / bought by tourists etc etc which
may not be registered or even protected.

And will probably not be held by people with railcards.
--
Roland Perry