On Saturday, 2 January 2016 17:00:55 UTC, Clive Page wrote:

Any why, if all you had to do to get a free trip was to claim to have an
Oyster card, would anyone during the outage try to use a contact-less card?

Lack of knowledge? My friend left for work at 0615 this morning, and said the gates were closed at Wood Green, so she touched in as normal (but a '1' flashed up on the display rather than her balance).

In message , at 17:00:46 on Sat, 2 Jan
2016, Clive Page remarked:

Any why, if all you had to do to get a free trip was to claim to have
an Oyster card, would anyone during the outage try to use a
contact-less card?

I think that's called "not understanding the exact nature of the outage
and not wanting to be caught deliberately evading fares, even if for a
short time TfL will decide not to worry about it".
--
Roland Perry

On Sun, 03 Jan 2016 17:32:16 +0000
Paul Corfield wrote:
I haven't seen the precise detail of why downloads seemingly failed
but I am not as deeply sceptical as some on here about the table
testing process. All the "oh they can't have tested it properly"
comments are unlikely to be true. There were / are very well

Well they quite evidently didn't test for some condition otherwise the failure
wouldn't have occured.

This is simple. Oyster cards hold value on the card and are read,
processed and then written back to with an updated balance and journey
history. In order to work out a PAYG fare or extension fare then you

I'd love to know how many hacked Oysters or DIY cards are out there that
can be loaded with a random value and/or don't decrement the value.

--
Spud

On 03/01/2016 17:32, Paul Corfield wrote:

Paul, thanks for your explanation.

Well far too many people were getting ridiculously excited about "free
travel" - it was all over Twitter. By the time the excitement reached
fever pitch the fault had been fixed.

I wonder how they brought the system back up - I assumed that there
would have been quite a number travelling using Oyster who didn't have
their card read on entry who would have been expected to touch out after
the system came back up, thereby getting an unresolved journey and a
hefty penalty. I haven't heard any howls of protest about that
occurring so maybe it didn't. Or maybe lots of people get unresolved
journeys so often and are rich enough that they simply don't care?


--
Clive Page

In message , at 11:00:45 on Sat, 2 Jan 2016,
Peter Smyth remarked:

The free travel ended at 0430 1st Jan and there weren't any reports of
problems yesterday.

That's a good point. I was expecting the free travel to have been all
day on the 1st.
--
Roland Perry

On 02/01/2016 11:44, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 11:00:45 on Sat, 2 Jan 2016,
Peter Smyth remarked:

The free travel ended at 0430 1st Jan and there weren't any reports of
problems yesterday.

That's a good point. I was expecting the free travel to have been all
day on the 1st.

Why? It's been 2345 NYE to 0430 NYD for years and years and years.

In message , at 23:29:07 on Tue, 5 Jan 2016,
Mizter T remarked:

The free travel ended at 0430 1st Jan and there weren't any reports of
problems yesterday.

That's a good point. I was expecting the free travel to have been all
day on the 1st.

Why? It's been 2345 NYE to 0430 NYD for years and years and years.

With the railway day ending at 4.30am I'd expect that to be called a New
Years Eve free travel period, not a NYD one.
--
Roland Perry

It's just occurred to me that the free fares on New Year's Eve aren't solely a case of TfL (or their sponsors') benevolence, but more to do with the difficulty of correctly charging for journeys which span the 'start of ticketing day' at 0430.

https://nighttube.london/customer-information/ says that the ticketing system wasn't previously capable of this, but Cubic have recently updated the backend so that it can cope when (if?) night tube eventually starts.

I wonder if it's coincidence that free travel on New Year's Eve began on 31/12/03 - the first year that Oyster cards were available?

On 02.01.16 9:30, Roland Perry wrote:
"Thousands of rail, bus and Tube passengers enjoyed free
transport on Saturday after London’s Oyster card network
collapsed.

Barriers are rail and tube stations were opened by staff after
Oyster card 'reader' machines used to register the start and end
of each journey failed to work throughout the network."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-
transport/12077955/Londons-Oyster-card-system-crashes-giving-thousands-
free-travel.html

I wonder if this is a random fault, or a "Y2K" type of problem.

I remember when the Nottingham City Transport smartcard had one of the
latter at New Year in around 2006.


What time did this occur? I used the tube yesterday without any
difficulties, though I was using contactless.

What are the stats, BTW, on contactless replacing Oyster?

In message , at 14:59:06 on Sat, 2 Jan 2016,
" remarked:

What time did this occur? I used the tube yesterday without any
difficulties, though I was using contactless.

Contactless was unaffected.

What are the stats, BTW, on contactless replacing Oyster?

Dunno; it would be good to get some numbers.

I assume this applies mainly to PAYG - I don't think you can load a
Travelcard Season onto a contactless CC.
--
Roland Perry