On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:57:07 +0000, Michael Hoffman wrote:

"Another new thing in the fares leaflet is the availability of Railcard
discounted fares caps on Oyster PAYG. You'll be able to have your Young
Persons, Disabled Persons, HM Forces or Senior Railcard loaded onto your
Oyster card (no details how) and from then on the off-peak fares cap for
you will be around a third lower than normal (e.g. £3.10 vs £4.80 for
Zones 1-2). There doesn't appear to be a discount on peak caps or single
journeys."

This is an interesting development which closes up a few of the gaps in
Oyster versus paper ticketing, but for my and my wife's purposes, not
enough of the gaps to make a switch viable, even when Southeastern
finally starts accepting Pay As You Go (whenever that is!).

My wife has a Zones 3-6 annual travelcard (on Oyster), so when we want
to go to central London she can get us both cheap all zones travelcards
(£4.70 I think they are). Am I right to think that the new Oyster
capabilities don't go any way towards replicating this situation?

By far the easier part of this, to my mind, should be to make sure that
her travel is capped at whatever the Oyster 2008 equivalent of the £4.70
is. Her Oyster card clearly already 'knows' that she has a Gold Card,
since it is loaded onto it. So it seems it should be an even easier task
to set this up than to set up the facilities described by the original
poster. Have they really overlooked this in the new system?

My side of our trips to London, however, I can see is rather a difficult
one to replicate. I could only suggest that we could be able to register
our relationship - as in, the fact that we often travel together, rather
than that we are married! - via the Oyster web site or similar; then if
the system noticed us making the same set of journeys at about the same
time on the same day, it could cap mine at the £4.70-equivalent cost as
well.

(Of course if on that day I took any journey that she did not also take,
my daily cap would revert to the standard daily Oyster PAYG cap, since
that journey would not be covered by her Gold Card's effect on
travelling companions. She, on the other hand, could travel as much as
she liked without me, since she holds the Gold Card.)

I realise my side of this is all quite complicated, but it does sound
like it should be logically achievable. And the first wish - for her
Oyster-stored Gold Card to provide a discount to her Oyster PAYG use -
doesn't even seem complicated.

What do you think - are they ever likely to get either of these ideas up
and running, in addition to these other laudable new features?

Paul