On Aug 23, 10:51 pm, asdf wrote:
The fact that you can't validate your top-up without making a journey
is poor design - either validation is a discrete function or it
isn't.

I don't think it's poor design. Topping up online and then collecting
at a Tube station is completely pointless unless you're also making a
Tube journey. (The whole advantage of online top-up is you avoid
having to queue at the ticket machine/office when you reach the
station, which is lost if you've got to do so anyway to collect the
top-up.)

The poor design element is that you can't validate on a bus, thereby
making validation actually an issue instead of the non-issue it ought
to be (yes, I know the excuses for this; however, it'd be trivially
easy to make bus-based readers connect to the base by GPRS every five
minutes to exchange relevant data with the central system).

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org