In message , at 15:44:33 on Wed, 25 Oct
2017, Clank remarked:

That's one of the Balkanised systems one would need to register with.

You really use that word far too often, and completely inappropriately*.

To the best of my knowledge there has never been a UN World Transit
Operator that was once responsible for all the planet's metro
systems but has sadly fragmented into warring factions.

I don't think the complaint was used internationally, but nationally

there is no obvious reason why a Stagecoach smart card shouldn't work
in every area Stagecoach have a presence.,

but they don't

FTAOD The complaint isn't that having bought a Cambridge Area Pass you
cannot use it on the bus in Sussex

It's that having acquired the Cambridge smart card, you cannot load
onto it a Sussex area pass.

I have two Stagecoach ITSO cards, one for EMT and anther for Cambus.
They are not interoporable. Nor would have been an SWT ITSO card had
they ever sent me one.

That's a complaint, and a valid one at that, although no worse than the
status quo (if I have a two different paper tickets or passes they don't
get printed on one card,) so again not balkanisation.

But a paper season ticket from Cambridge to Basingstoke would work as
one bit of paper, you can't load such a thing onto one ITSO card.

But if that was Roland's complaint, he would of course welcome EMV
contactless ticketing which solves the problem at a stroke. But as he
notes above he considers this a huge step back and a case of
"balkanisation" because he'd need to log into a different website for his
NS exes receipts to the one for his TfL expenses receipts. (He may be a
goatherder, but he is one with terribly first world problems.)

The problem is caused precisely by the division of the evidence (I
almost wrote paper-trail) between different backoffices.

The other issue is that for example, if I look at my Card statement this
week there's an entry for:

25/10/17 GREATER ANGLIA T/O PURCHASE £13.30

It doesn't tell me *which* ticket office, what product (or how many
people travelling), where the end points were, or even in this case the
correct date of either purchase or travel [in this case both on Monday
23rd].

He also considers every new product released which he doesn't want to use
evidence of "balkanisation". (E.g. mobile tickets.) Among many other
misuses of his Word of 2017.

As they are a further fragmentation of the ticketing system (I need to
use the correct booking site, and an associated new user account, to buy
them, rather than "any booking site") it's a perfectly correct use of
the word.
--
Roland Perry