On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, David Walters wrote:

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:40:13 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, MIG wrote:

The ticket gates usually stay where they are. Readers in trains along
with some kind of GPS would save on the ridiculous going up the
escalator situation when passing the boundary of your paper
travelcard,

Serves you right for having a paper travelcard .

Gates should be able to do this; say you have a Z12 paper travelcard
and an oyster with some pre-pay, and you go from Z1 to Z4, when you
want to get out at your destination, you should be able to stick your
paper card in, have it rejected with an 'excess fare required' message,
then touch your oyster to pay it. Well, that would be nice, anyway.

That wouldn't work. People would get to the zone 4 barrier with their
zone 1-2 ticket, get an excess fare required message and wonder off to
find a member of staff if they don't have an Oyster card. Meanwhile the
person behind them would end up paying the excess fare from their Oyster
balance.

I knew someone was going to say that!

A technical solution would be to have the gates able to detect when a
paper ticket had been pulled out of the return slot. You have the
excession mechanism operate only if the paper ticket is still in the slot,
with the gate considering a swipe after a paper ticket has been removed as
a new interaction. This only fails if someone puts in a paper ticket, is
rebuffed, wanders off leaving the ticket in place, and the person behind
them doesn't notice.

tom

--
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