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Old September 24th 06, 06:32 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london
jonmorris jonmorris is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Jul 2005
Posts: 38
Default Oyster System to become national by default. Is this a cunning plot- shock horror

Roland Perry wrote:
Sounds like one of those big public sector IT projects that fails to be
implemented properly. I'm quite impressed [1] at the way Oyster (and
separately the Congestion Charge) have been implemented over London, but
rolling it out to hundreds of provincial cities and deregulated bus
companies seems a little ambitious.


Yes, I agree but we have a pretty standard ticketing system on the
railway at the moment. Most buses use the same, old, ticketing system -
so at one time, they all got them from the same supplier/s. Some have
taken the iniative to go a step further, but that isn't the way to go
as it becomes confusing for anyone other than regulars or those
travelling long distances and mixing different ticket types and
procedures.

If every company could buy a working system 'off the shelf' then it
wouldn't be that much a problem to do. You don't have one person
(especially not a Government) trying to install it on buses, tubes,
trains, coaches etc - you have a recognised standard, then any number
of companies can produce the equipment to work with it. Every operator
can brand their own smartcards, but they are still interchangeable.

If the card system held credit, like Oyster, you could operate a simple
pay as you go system on anything - and why wouldn't that work abroad?
Well, apart from the currency conversion issue until we get the Euro.
Such a system could even be rolled out to taxis. Whoever debits the
card gets the money (less a commission fee) rather like a credit or
debit card (but unlike those, you can swipe in/out at gates etc).

Effectively, it becomes an e-cash system. Funnily enough, Oyster had
visions of their card working for loads of things - which presumably
fell down when it became clear that outside of the transport industry,
there probably wasn't much interest in installing the equipment.

Jonathan

[1] As far as it goes. The inability to access my data via the web is a
bit of a let down; and things like having to nominate one specific
station for certain transactions has let me down in the past (when my
plans changed and I didn't go anywhere near that station after all -
something that's more likely to happen for an out-of-towner perhaps).


The system isn't perfect, and may not replace cash or credit cards (in
fact, I hope not), but a simple PAYG system that can also hold season
tickets and other tickets is a good idea - especially if it is accepted
in many places. I have no idea how much the reader/writer equipment
costs, but in the future it may well be the case that you can get one
for home.