On Wed, 22 Mar 2006, Tristán White wrote:

The mind boggles, really. So if I have a day travelcard loaded onto the
Oyster

.... then you're not using the Oyster card we're talking about. Oyster
doesn't support day travelcards. It does cap pre-pay charges to day
travelcard levels (or rather, 50p below), but that's not the same thing.
It's functionally very similar, but conceptually distinct.

I agree that it is all highly inconvenient and awkward, but i don't accept
that it's complicated or particularly absurd.

More pre-pay/travelcard integration would be good, though. This would be
pretty simple from a user point of view - you wave your oyster at a ticket
machine and ask to buy a travelcard, and rather than charging you full
whack, it takes the applicable pre-pay spend off the price.

For example, you hop on the DLR at King George V, trundle along to Canning
Town, paying a quid for the privilege, take the Jubilee to Stratford,
paying another quid, then want to buy a zone 234 travelcard to take you to
Richmond; that would normally cost 7.40, but since you've got two pounds
of pre-pay counting against it, you pay 5.40. And everybody's happy.
Except that you paid 7.40 in total, whereas capping would have kicked in
at 6.90; consider that a surcharge for the actual piece of paper.

It would probably want to mark the pre-pay balance as having been used in
this way, to stop a capped travelcard being used to print out an endless
supply of paper travelcards.

And if an Inspector came on the train as it was passing through Camden
Road, for example, could I get a fine (but not one as it is passing through
Kilburn HR on the Liverpool St to Walthamstow line?)

If one was on a train passing through Kilburn High Road on the Liverpool
Street to Walthamstow line, i should imagine fines would be the least of
your concerns.

tom

--
You have now found yourself trapped in an incomprehensible maze.