On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 16:38:38 -0600, Tristán White wrote:

Basically, if you forget to touch in at eg Dundonald Road because the
tram is about to leave, and the tram is packed, and you genuinely try
and show you're not cheating the system by touching in on the platform,
you will in fact be penalised.

Only if you don't touch in on the District Line validators at the
start of your Tube journey.

If you simply pretend the tram journey never happened, you'd be charged
£4.

Ditto.

If you try and show your honesty, you'd be charged £4.80 or £5.

Ditto.

It is ridiculous, and shows just how draconian this £4 measure really
is.

Because in an ideal world, the system should recognise honesty and
simply charge the £0.80 or £1 and nothing else.

If it only charged 80p or £1 then people would be able to get away
with deliberately not touching in in order to save money.

I don't wish to sound too dramatic, but LUL has effectively
singlehandedly destroyed two important mainstays of the way we live.
Basically:

(a) the customer is always right
(b) you are innocent until proven guilty.

What this system does is charge you £4 assuming you're guilty, and then
you have to try and prove your innocence.

I agree with you here. They also go out of their way to make it
difficult to plead your innocence (ticket offices are instructed not
to help you, even though they're otherwise perfectly capable of doing
so).

And when you try and be honest
by touching in on the platform, you are further penalised. The system is
an ass.

I think you're going over the top here. If you're going to go round
haphazardly touching validators you're not required to and not
touching ones you are required to, you can't expect the system to be
able to charge the correct fare.

It's like that story I mentioned a little while a go. A guy enters
Plaistow station and the barriers are open, walks through, remembers
that he should have touched in, and then turns and touches "out" not on
the open barrier but on one of the exits. He then goes to Mile End,
exits, and is charged £8.

In this day and age the system should see that it is actually
nonsensical to exit Plaistow and then 10 minutes or so later exit Mile
End and call it two unfinished journeys. But I guess we said goodbye to
good old common sense when we turned all our thinking over to computers.

In fairness, a dose of common sense is (hopefully) only a phone call
away (albeit an 0845 one) at the Oyster helpdesk.