On Wednesday, 6 November 2013 23:59:35 UTC, Paul Corfield wrote:

Can you explain what you mean by "so much human intervention"? What
would be your example of a system or facility not requiring so much
intervention?

My aims perhaps differ from TfL's (with union pressure) given my experience of German systems which are generally completely unstaffed except drivers and the odd security guard, but I would have had a core requirement that all ticket offices could be closed when the system was fully implemented, and that it could fully replace paper tickets. This wouldn't necessarily result in redundancies, but rather I would have roving staff to assist in the use of ticket machines. I'd do the same for the mainline, FWIW.

So, some examples of how I would have done it differently:-

1. No unresolved journeys. The way I would work this is the same way as many other systems do it, such as Singapore - touching in charges the maximum Oyster single fare to the card that could apply from that station (subject to cap if appropriate for London), and touching out refunds back the difference back to the journey you actually made. If you don't touch out, you don't get it back, tough. That is powerful motivation, and far, far less complicated.

2. OSIs (out of station interchanges) seem to be the biggest cause of this. I've posted about ways these could be tidied up before - one way is to always close the journey on touching out, but reopen it when touching back in at an OSI location. Leaving journeys open was a silly piece of design again asking for a need for intervention.

3. All card transactions, be that dispensing, refunding or whatever, possible ONLY from automated ticket machines, NOT from ticket offices.

4. A full abolition of paper tickets except accepting cross-London NR tickets (requiring a smaller number of accepting barriers, thus lower maintenance cost). Singles/returns could either be issued on Oyster cards returnable for refund later, or on retained contactless "tokens" like Delhi's system (I think) which are inserted into and retained by the barriers for re-use.

I just remain amazed that a system designed in the 21st century for the 21st century has so many holes in it that it requires so much human intervention.

Neil