Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 10 May 2005, Dave Arquati wrote:


I got mine in the post today. They've moved from issuing plain old
photocards to printing your photo and name onto a personalised Oyster,
which is encoded with your discount entitlement,


Do you get a new one every year?

No. The entitlement has a finish date encoded, so once that runs out,
you can either carry on using it for adult-rate tickets, prepay, or get
the entitlement renewed if appropriate.

I'm not sure if the finish date is the end of the current academic year
or the end date of your course as entered on the application form. Both
are the same for me at the moment, as I'm starting a new course in October.

so you can buy your discounted season tickets from the machine or
online, rather than having to go to the ticket office to do it.


Hmm. I can buy student-rate period travelcards at the machine; i have to
do it via a renewal rather than a new ticket purchase, though.


Unfortunately you can't get your existing Oyster's prepay balance
transferred onto it; looks like I'll have a main Oyster and an
emergency/guest Oyster from now on.


Huh? Can't you give in your old one and get the money back? I've never
tried that, but i'd assumed it was possible - after all, you pay a deposit
for an Oyster, and 'deposit' implies the possibility of a refund.

You can, but I don't think I can be bothered with the hassle. I really
just wanted to transfer the prepay from my old card straight onto the
new one.

I mention this all because a while ago we had a thread mentioning YP
Railcard discounts on Travelcards versus prepay capping. It would seem
that since Oysters are now issued to students in this fashion, it would
be easy to set different prepay cap levels for a student Oyster,
corresponding to the YP discounts.

That would be nice.

I'm still looking forward to capping to 7DTC etc prices, though ...

Yes, that would be extremely handy, particularly for students in the
summer term who may be going to and from university unpredictably.

I'm still slightly bemused by the discount Zone 2 7DTC only costing 10p
more than a bus pass. Make a single tube journey to/from Zone 2 and
you're quids in.


--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London