In message , at 18:00:38 on
Fri, 1 Nov 2013, Paul Corfield remarked:
On Fri, 1 Nov 2013 16:48:12 +0000, Roland Perry
wrote:

In message , at 15:50:47 on
Fri, 1 Nov 2013, Paul Corfield remarked:
Proof of payment does not exist
if the ability to reveal it depends on the integrity of the party demanding
the proof.

It's as though I bought something in a shop and, when asking for my receipt
to ensure there are no problem passing the security guard on the exit, am
told I don't need one because the shop has all the evidence it needs to
satisfy itself that I paid for the goods.

There's also a parallel with the move from signing credit card
authorisations to chip-and-pin.

We are being coerced into having to trust potential adversaries.

Any yet millions and millions of transactions are conducted daily in
London using Oyster with minimal problems. Are you seriously
suggesting that hundreds of miles of paper transaction slips should be
created for no real purpose? How do you deal with ticket gates on
railway stations? Remove them? fit printers and require peo

I think there's clearly some merit in both points of view.

There might be but I rather suspect the "receipt view" is borne out of
the practice in some council areas of tickets being issued when
someone presents a national concessionary permit on a smartcard
reader. Those "chits" are often zero value so utterly pointless in my
view but presumably give someone a "warm feeling" that something has
happened that allows them to travel.

I've always thought that the chits were for the benefit of the bus
company who could use the log of the number of them issued to get their
money from the local authority.

We have years and years of experience in London of dealing with
hundreds of millions of transactions a month without needing to kill
millions of trees to create paper receipts. It is pointless, IMO, to
go back to any sort of system that requires the regular creation of
receipts. Oyster users can request a card printout on any TfL bus or
at a LU station which I think is a reasonable fall back position for
people who want to know what has happened.

As I said earlier, the Oyster auditability is much improved, but it
wasn't always like that.

Obviously no-one is going to start issuing bits of paper to confirm
Smartcard transactions because going e-ticket/e-cash is the whole point
of introducing them.

Part of the point but lets not quibble unduly.

But there's a genuine concern that transactions become *much* harder to
audit from the consumer's point of view, and a lot of the time it's a
case of "trust us, we have the computer".

Well possibly. I think what we really have is a very large user base
with a very large spread of experience (good and bad) with technology.
We all have different levels of acceptance of systems and I'm pretty
sure this is why you get differing attitudes to the level of
reassurance that people require.

Ultimately, if it comes to a dispute where a passenger believes they did
touch in, but "the system" says they didn't, there has to be a
non-combative way to resolve it with either satisfactory and timely
forensic auditing, or always giving the passenger the benefit of the
doubt.

The last time I was in Notthingham I popped into the NCT shop in the
central area and it was very busy with people buying or renewing
tickets. I assume that is par for the course.

They appear to think they are running a Post Office, so there's
regularly a long queue, and out of the door. The biggest queue I saw was
the day after a "Y2010 bug" disabled lots of their cards, and that
stretched a hundred yards down the street.

I think a lot of the problems arise because the systems are really
designed for season tickets, where (as you've described regarding your
own usage) it doesn't really matter [to anyone] if you swipe zero, one
or two times. And trying to apply the same processes to PAYG use, where
suddenly it does matter.

You're always going to have some sort of "confirmation" transaction to
register your use of a public transport service.

I was checking things out at Sainsbury's self service earlier today, and
about a third of the items that appeared to register (a loud *beep* from
the scanner) suddenly became an "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA", and
needed to be re-scanned.

What is interesting with the ITSO card applications on National Rail
is the insistence on the cards always being used to touch in and out.
I confess, apart from gathering passenger usage stats, I do not see
the reason for mandating card validation for season tickets. If there
are ticket gates then fair enough but ungated stations have those
teensy validators on poles. If the TOCs were offering PAYG or
something similar on their smart tickets then I can completely
understand making validation compulsory.

Is it mind-games like those played by TfL, where they insist *everyone*
to touch in and out, just to make sure that the PAYG people they want to
charge are conditioned to touch in and out. Meanwhile the season ticket
holders are doing an irrelevant dance.
--
Roland Perry