London Banter - View Single Post

[email protected] · February 27th 17, 12:19 AM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Roland Perry)
wrote:

In message , at 21:37:12 on Sat, 25
Feb 2017, Richard J. remarked:

But if "the current rules are an utter pain", there must be some value
in a scheme which avoids the pain. So how much interest would you lose
by lending TfL £20? Isn't it worth it to avoid the utter pain?

I top up my Oyster manually when it gets to about £2. The only use I
have for it is two Z1 singles. The issue with pre-paid one-function
cards is that you can easily end up with a lot of them. A provincial
bus card being one example.

It's like those coffee-shop cardboard loyalty cards - when I buy a
coffee there's rarely a choice of vendor, so I'd need to be carrying
around half a dozen cards all the time.

My usage is so irregular I just add £5 usually, occasionally just a bit of
small change, to cover my immediate needs. My most recent usage days were a
long series between 29th October and 1st December (11 days in all which some
of you might guess the reason for), before that 15th September, 2nd August
and 23rd April. Before that the last use was in 2015. Looking at the history
I am reminded of another reason I'm glad that the crediting system has
improved. I had a refund in 2015 due to the Heathrow T5 gates not
communicating properly (my wife had a similar problem there in the other
direction on the same trip) and arranging to pick it up was a right hassle.
Nowadays they can just credit your bank account.

I see I also got some odd messages and history records at North Sheen where
the ticket machines are inside the ticket barriers and I topped up between
entry and exit, something Oyster isn't really designed to do.

--
Colin Rosenstiel