On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 18:42:19 +0000, Dave A wrote:

Matthew wrote:
In London. Presuambly the names of other cards will also be used in
their own areas (Yorcard in south Yorkshire, etc). While the
compatibility issues does seem to get portrayed as evil TOCs conspiring
against cuddly Oysters out of pure malice, the desire of DfT and the
TOCs to have a national set of open standards rather than lots of
individual incompatible proprietary systems does strike me a good idea.
An awful lot of UK transport technology and planning seems to be a case
of "I wouldn't start from here", and getting a standardised system might
avoid another set of problems in the future.



Oystercards are now included in the ITSO spec, at page 88 of
http://itso.org.uk/content/Specifica..._1_2006-10.pdf

According to today's London Lite, Chiltern are to accept PAYG from June
at the rest of its Greater London stations (Northolt Park to Wembley
Stadium) .

They are also to retail cards outside London.

"We are also happy to announce that we are working very hard with
Transport for London on being the first train company to sell Oyster
Smartcards outside London. We will be launching this to our passengers
in 2007"

As Chiltern have Cubic equipment at their stations this means they have
the smallest technological hurdle to climb over for this initial stage.
They've always been very keen on Smartcards - even way back when I was
involved as I talked to Adrian Shooter and their marketing chap about
them.

C2C are also reported to be enabling PAYG acceptance at Dagenham Dock
and Rainham.

Well they are already gated and must be working to the new zonal fares
anyway.

That's good news - with two TOCs fully on-board within London, pressure
will mount on others to follow suit. Of course, Chiltern and c2c are the
easiest...

Indeed and I notice from an article in a paper last week that the two
Govia franchises appear to be most awkward. This is particularly odd
given Southern's launch of zonal based tickets long before the last
fares revision and also the proposed trial of PAYG between Balham and
Victoria (all news of which has disappeared). I can't recall if the
South Eastern franchise got caught by the DfT "you will adopt Oyster and
Smartcards" requirement - I don't think it did although more gating was
part of the franchise commitment.

I imagine a system update of Oyster will be necessary so that it can
handle NR zonal fares.

Not really sure about this as every LU gate can recognise a fare from
every station in the zonal area. Where the TOCs have installed gates
then "in theory" such gates should recognise the fare from everywhere
that can issue to that location. I don't believe it actually works like
that but I can't see any issue with such equipment knowing fares from LU
zonal origins and all NR locations within the zones as a minimum
requirement.

Where it gets complex is what the fare is for a given journey -
especially as more orbital journey opportunities become available.

Passengers using this new PAYG territory will
have be especially careful to touch in and touch out correctly, because
cross-London fares calculated incorrectly could be quite expensive!

This statement I entirely agree with.
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!