On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, MIG wrote:

On Nov 25, 5:31*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, David Cantrell wrote:
On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 08:08:28PM +0000, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Sun, 23 Nov 2008, Stephen Osborn wrote:
But to get to a Tube station, as I live in SE London, I would have to
take an Overground train and so I would normally buy a one day
Travelcard at the train station. *To use my Oyster at the Tube station I
would either need to buy a train return ticket instead or use my Oyster
PAYG when I had a valid Travelcard. *Either of those would mean I was
paying extra for the privilege of switching on auto top-up.
Yes. Paying one pound extra. Once.

Two pounds and ninety pence actually.

No, one pound.

You set up auto top-up, and nominate the most convenient station outside
Z1 for pickup. You go to your local railway station or ticket seller and
buy a paper one-day travelcard. You travel to the nominated station using
it. You enter the system using your oyster card, activating auto top-up,
and travel to another station outside Z1. You leave the system, with your
auto top-up activated, and having paid a pound for the journey. You then
continue your day's travelling on the paper travelcard.

From the next day on, you use the oyster card.

The only extra cost over having auto top-up activated at a tube station is
the one pound cost of the tube trip.

That's the only explanation I can think of for how they could have
deployed a system with so many obvious design flaws.

Because *obviously* it wouldn't have been pushed through far too quickly
for mere political expediency!

We should have another utl meet, this time with a tinfoil hat making
workshop.

Can someone please just explain the logic of making a million people
solve a million individual problems, costing them a pound or whatever,
instead of TfL just solving one problem, by allowing top-up to be
activated at the ticket office?

This is, of course, a really good question, but it's one that i suspect
that nobody on this group can actually answer. Is there a technical reason
why it's hard to make ticket machines or ticket office equipment capable
of activating auto top-up? Something to do with the software in it, or the
kind of network connection it has? If so, that would be your answer. If
not, then i can't think of a good reason. But without knowing about the
technical details of the machinery involved, we can't answer it. I don't
know about that, and i assume from the fact that we're having this
discussion that none of the other participants do either!

There is someone on this group who's posted some more insider stuff about
oyster before - who was that? Does he have any ideas?

If not, we could write to TfL.

tom

--
The literature is filled with bizarre occurrances for which we have
no explanation