Roland Perry wrote:
In message
, at 11:12:57 on Thu, 7 Nov 2013, Recliner remarked:
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.

But isn't that exactly what Oyster does?

No, because you can phone them up and argue about it.

The reason you can argue is if the system has gone wrong (eg, gates not
working, or train failed/delayed excessively), not because the basic
algorithm is wrong.


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.

But isn't that exactly what Oyster does?

A slight variation on this... Isn't one of the known problems that when
you travel A-B complete your business rapidly and then travel B-A, when
B has OSI? In other words the initial exit doesn't complete the journey,
and when you re-enter the network and go back where you came from it gets confused.

I think it 'provisionally' completes the journey, but reopens it if the
station is re-entered through another exit within a specified time.