On Nov 1, 10:25*am, (Neil Williams)
wrote:
On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:41:46 -0700 (PDT), Boltar

wrote:
I always used to use my other halfs season ticket oyster if she didn't
need it that day. Why shouldn't they be transfered?

There is the other side of it, which is that if I forget my rail
season ticket, I can have the purchase of the necessary return ticket
refunded up to twice a year, and I can have it replaced for a nominal
fare if lost/stolen. *This wouldn't be possible with a transferrable
season ticket, as someone could entirely validly be using it[1], and
so another could be effectively obtained fraudulently.

The answer is to do as the Germans do, and offer the choice of
non-transferrable with that option, and transferrable without it.
Perhaps a slightly higher price could be charged for transferrable
tickets.

For weekly bus tickets costing 11 quid, this isn't a big issue. *For
an annual season costing thousands, it's a massive issue if you lost
the ability to have another issued for an admin fee if it was lost or
stolen.

[1] This could be where Oyster comes in, as the old one could be
blocked, so this might still be possible.

If it was a paper annual season, there would be a record of the ticket
number and it could be blocked.

When someone grabbed my annual season (possibly not deliberately) back
in the early 1990s I had a long discussion about it with BR where they
said that it was possible to look for a pattern of use (and hang out
ready to arrest someone?) and also possible to stop it from working
barriers.

I said why not do that then, but they said that they didn't do that in
case it caused a panic at the barrier. I thought that was completely
spurious, becuase as soon as it was known that stolen seasons don't
work the barriers people wouldn't bother stealing them.