Dave Arquati wrote:
MIG wrote:
Peter Frimberley wrote:
On 18 Sep 2006 12:35:39 GMT, Adrian wrote:

Peter Frimberley ) gurgled happily,
sounding much like they were saying :

You can share a prepay Oyster card with other people but not during
the same journey.
And the system should have some assumption built in about the minimum
duration of a bus journey, but you you don't touch off a bus, so there
is no definite time when you stop using it (and can pass it to someone
else).
We don't know that it doesn't have such an assumption. It may be as
little as a few minutes, just enough to prevent more than one person
travelling on the same card.
If it's PAYG, what's the *problem* with several people travelling on the
same card...? Isn't it absolutely the same thing as one person paying in
cash for three tickets for themselves and the two people they're travelling
with?
Well it mucks up the prepay capping, or at least makes the calculation
on whether a selection of journies have qualified for the cap that
much more difficult. Not impossible, but definitely adds an extra
degree of complexity.

Of course two people using the same Oyster card at different time
periods of the day also mucks up the prepay cap, but no more so than
people sharing a paper one day travel card.

Also what happens if two people get on the tube/bus together, but want
to get off at different stations/stops. The card can only go with one
of them.

In theory it ought to be possible but in practice it probably causes
more problems than it is worth, so they just disallow it altogether.



I think I'd prefer that it only allowed one person to use the card and
simply didn't allow a second touch within a time limit, rather than it
charge me twice if I accidentally touched twice while getting on.

I think there can't be many situations where two consecutive touches in
the same bus on it's same journey wouldn't be some kind of mistake (eg
someone assuming they have to touch on the way out) and therefore
shouldn't be charged.


Perhaps a better solution would be to have an error message that says
"user has just paid for this journey"...



Firstly, I'd like to hang my head in shame and apologise for that
apostrophe, which was a pure typo, but still unforgiveable.

Secondly, yes, I think that's the same solution. The nature of not
allowing a second touch would presumably have to be some kind of error
message.