On 29 Dec 2006 07:21:29 -0800,
John B wrote:

Based on my experience of living in London, commuting in London using
Oyster, and being surrounded by friends and colleagues who do the same,
the people for whom Oyster works fine nearly all the time
encompasses... err... all of them, while the people who are cursed with
errors and failures and crashes and bugs and breakdowns are... two
people on Usenet.

(the only problem I've had with Oyster was forgetting to renew my
season ticket, not touching in at Finsbury Park because you don't need
to if you have a season ticket, being stopped by inspectors while
changing trains at Green Park and PF-d £20 for using PP without
touching in. Which was more my fault than Oyster's anyway...)

I work in London and have a prepay Oyster but almost never use it (about
40GBP/year in total which is why I no longer bother with Z1-6 on my Gold
Card) - and when I do use it it's typically 3 journeys in one day so I'm
using it less than once per month.

The problem is that when you use it so infrequently you don't realise it
hasn't worked properly. I've (only) had two problems - one at Leicester
Square where the barriers were open and my card obviously didn't
register when I badged in - I now know to watch for the green light to
come on - but I had no idea at all that there had been a problem until a
couple of months later when I went to top up and saw that there was an
unresolved journey.

The second problem was at Euston where again my card obviously didn't
register properly - the barrier definitely beeped and the green light
was on but the barrier slammed on me (it hurts). Clearly the person
behind me didn't realise I'd done it wrong either because they'd already
put their ticket into the barrier so then I was trapped between the
closed barrier saying "take ticket" and the person trying to get out.
(I then had to queue for the ticket office to find out whether I had an
unresolved journey - I didn't. I could, in theory have used one of the
machines but, of course, they weren't working properly either)

The only problems I've ever had with paper tickets (on NR or the tube)
is, a) my gold card fades and needs reprinting after about 6 months as
it's unreadable although it still works fine in the barriers, and b)
when travelling on a single ticket, usually they are swallowed by the
barrier but occasionally you have to take the ticket and I usually spend
an extra 5 seconds working out what has gone wrong before I see the
ticket and the gate opens.

I'm tempted to go back to an all zones travel card. I'll see how oyster
works this year and then, if I'm still seeing occasional problems I'll
probably go back to travelcard. OK, it will cost me about another
250GBP/year but the knowledge that I definitely won't have to queue for
ten minutes to work out what has gone wrong is worth far more to me.

(Actually I'd like to see the ability to buy paper tickets using oyster
- I don't care about the cap and usually when I am travelling I'm with
other people so the ability to go up to a machine, press Z1 single and
then badge my oyster and get a paper ticket would be ideal particularly
as I can then buy tickets for others as well.)

Tim.

--
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = - @B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t,"
and there was light.

http://tjw.hn.org/ http://www.locofungus.btinternet.co.uk/