London Banter - Are paper Bus Passes being abolished?

On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 22:36:20 +0200, "tim"
wrote:

"Robin May" wrote in message
. 1.4...
"tim" wrote the following in:

But you can't completely disenfranchise them. Especially in a
town with a large number of tourists, you have to design a system
that works for them as well.

We have that. One day travelcards, one day bus passes, single tickets,
carnet. It's not as if they have no method of using TfL services!

But if you look at the title of the thread and go back to the
orignal question you see that it asks if ODBPs are only to
be issued via Oyster in future and it is this ticket type that I
am commenting upon.

Oyster is designed to take any type of ticket. However there was never
any intention to remove the paper & magnetic stripe tickets. It is even
less likely now given that the roadside machines for cashless services /
zone sell paper unencoded one day bus passes. What is more likely is
that there will be moves to switch people into Oyster cards for long
period tickets where the ability to hotlist the card if it is lost is a
definite advantage or else via product features like discounted fares
and capping.

On a related note I have an Octopus card for Hong Kong. I only ever
travel there as a tourist and there was a three year break between my
last two trips. All I did was revalidate the card at the airport, the
cash balance was still correct and I loaded some value and off I went.
There is no reason why a tourist visiting London could not do the same -
many of them happily buy weekly travelcards and fork out for the
travelcard photo (where it is needed).
--
Paul C

Admits to working for London Underground!