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Changeless bus passenger denied boarding
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Tim Roll-Pickering wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote: It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night, though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours. Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the tube is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge Oysters that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does. True. The situation i was primarily thinking of is trying to get home after a night out, where generally, i'm in the middle of town where there are lots of tube stations. I would imagine this pattern accounts for the majority of post-closing-time bus use, although of course not all. I'm stumped as to how you could deal with the problem in the situation you describe, though. Night buses don't take cash, so no solution involving a chit is going to work. Putting chip-and-pin on buses seems like a non-starter. I think that means you have to put fixed machines around the place, taking either notes or cards, and dispensing either a fistful of tickets (or a ticket and a chit) or oyster charge. Basically, the same as the machines i want to put outside tube stations. You couldn't put those at every bus stop, or even as many bus stops as have ticket-for-coin machines, as they'd be too expensive (i assume). You could probably put them at railway stations and key bus nodes (places like Clapton Pond, say). Would that do? One day, we might see oyster chargers as part of every cash machine. That might largely solve the problem. How about a mobile phone scheme? You text a special number, it charges you two quid or whatever (as mobile phones sometimes do, i don't know how) and sends you a code. The driver taps the code into a special gizmo on the bus, checks to see if it flashes a green light saying the code valid, and then prints you a ticket. The special gizmo could work in one of two ways. Either it's in touch with a central server, in which case it just calls in and checks your code, with the server then crossing the code of its list of valid codes, or else it's standalone, in which case it can verify the code using some cryptography. The problem is then preventing replay attacks, where someone uses the same code more than once. You could perhaps do this with a combination of time and space - codes could be valid for 15 minutes after issuing, with the time being embedded in the code, and only valid in the area from where the message was sent. You could detect unused codes at end-of-day data reconciliation, and refund the buyer, so people whose codes expired before they could use them wouldn't be punished. To speed things up, the code could be in the form of an image, ie a 2D barcode [1], which could then be read by a cheap little webcam sat next to the driver. tom [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode#2D_barcodes -- On Question Time last night, Tony Benn was saying that the way to solve the low turnout at elections was to make voting compulsory. I think the solution is for someone to start a political party that doesn't contain wall-to-wall *******s. -- John Rowland |
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Changeless bus passenger denied boarding
On 18 Sep, 14:46, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Tim Roll-Pickering wrote: Tom Anderson wrote: It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night, though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours. Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the tube is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge Oysters that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does. True. The situation i was primarily thinking of is trying to get home after a night out, where generally, i'm in the middle of town where there are lots of tube stations. I would imagine this pattern accounts for the majority of post-closing-time bus use, although of course not all. I'm stumped as to how you could deal with the problem in the situation you describe, though. Night buses don't take cash, so no solution involving a chit is going to work. Putting chip-and-pin on buses seems like a non-starter. I think that means you have to put fixed machines around the As part of the upgrade process for Oystercard readers to accept ITSO cards, the readers will be upgraded to accept Visa Wave and Mastercard Paypass cards. https://www.swiftcommunity.net/blogs...ail.cfm?id=448 |
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Changeless bus passenger denied boarding
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Matthew Dickinson wrote:
On 18 Sep, 14:46, Tom Anderson wrote: On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Tim Roll-Pickering wrote: Tom Anderson wrote: It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night, though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours. Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the tube is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge Oysters that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does. True. The situation i was primarily thinking of is trying to get home after a night out, where generally, i'm in the middle of town where there are lots of tube stations. I would imagine this pattern accounts for the majority of post-closing-time bus use, although of course not all. I'm stumped as to how you could deal with the problem in the situation you describe, though. Night buses don't take cash, so no solution involving a chit is going to work. Putting chip-and-pin on buses seems like a non-starter. I think that means you have to put fixed machines around the As part of the upgrade process for Oystercard readers to accept ITSO cards, the readers will be upgraded to accept Visa Wave and Mastercard Paypass cards. https://www.swiftcommunity.net/blogs...ail.cfm?id=448 Cool! tom -- got EXPERTISE in BADASS BRAIN FREEZE |
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