Future Ticketing Project (FTP) and ITSO

What I meant is that if the system is going to change how it works, even if none of the new 'bells and whistles' are being implemented at the same time, it would be good for passengers to know, in case things do start working differently / in possibly unexpected ways.

As for the ending of the prepaid 'pay once - ride at will' Travelcard and replacing it with a capping system that requires passengers to always touch-in/out, even at open stations, I've talked about this probability before (somewhere else) and although at the time I was told that I was wrong at a later date someone found a TfL document which postulated something very similar to what I had been saying. This was several years ago and at present I do not have a link to 'prove' what I am saying. If I manage to find the link I will add it to this thread.

Especially because fares capping requires touch in/out card reads even the loss of weekly Travelcards will be bad news for passengers who buy boundary zone add-ons for journeys beyond the Travelcard zones.

Simon

There is one ITSO feature that I have discovered, A Southeastern Key card will work the SouthWest Trains gates at Waterloo and Vauxhall respectively. I made a round trip on that route and all worked fine, despite Southeastern's posters stating that the SE Key card won't work on other train companies services. Perhaps ITSO is being connected up together behind the scenes, before a big public announcement a couple of years down the line. However Southeastern have missed out enabling their Lewisham station only on their own network for some strange reason!!

Checking the ITSO Journey History record shows Waterloo(SWT) touch In, and Vauxhall(SWT) touch out, so Southeastern's card works on SWT now.

SWT TVMs outside London allow SWT point-to-point tickets to be loaded on to any ITSO card.

Question on contactless.
My card is associated with a joint account - two cards, one number. If I and the other cardholder both use our respective cards can the system tell the difference?

Will the system let one of us touch in if the other has already done so at the same gate (or the same bus) just before?
If I touch in at station A in Zone 1, partner then touches in at station B in Zone 6, I then touch out at station C in Zone 1, and lastly partner touches out at station D in Zone 4, how does the system know whether to charge for a journey within Z1 and a journey from Z6 to Z4, or for journeys Z1 to Z4 and Z6 to Z1?

Presumably this is because the chip in the card/device has an ID number from when it was manufactured, whereas the card number (used for payment) is only assigned (embossed) when the card is issued. A bit like my NHS CareID card; it has a UUID printed on the front which stays constant, but also a card serial number which is specific to the card and allows the card to be cancelled should it be lost.

The episode with the hospital fully staffed but with no patients?

The integrated transport policy was the one I had in mind. Certainly has Sir Humphries finger prints all over the lack of progress.

re: the above, a week or so ago a relative who lives outside London used the Internet to top-up his Oystercard and was alarmed because it did not ask him to nominate a collection station. He ended up contacting the TfL helpline to see if all was well or there had been a snafu. He was relieved to hear that the reason for not asking about nominated stations is because such is no longer a requirement. Nevertheless, exactly what I said above is what happened - the passengers only found out about changes when the system no longer worked as expected. TfL did not tell people in advance. He told me about this on Thursday evening, 20th July.

As for the Oystercard station, I suppose that people with first gen cards will still be able to use them - its just that they wont be able to use the gee whiz smartphone features. This is implied but not stated.

I wonder whether weekly capping will only work with second gen Oystercards? I hope so! I do not want weekly capping, one reason being because I fear that days when I travel in zones 1-3 and other days when I travel in just the outer zones (typically 2-4 or 2-6) will be aggregated with the total amount charged being as if I had travelled in all six zones everytime that I travelled. Certainly if I had bought a weekly season for a these journeys I would need a 1-6! - this being why I opt for daily capping rather than weeklies.

Simon

And back in disaster land did your relative pick up the value that they had ordered? If the answer is yes then what is the great issue? As already explained there was a slight slippage in the public announcement but your post seems to suggest the enhanced functionality was actually live and working. I could understand genuine angst if the PAYG upload process failed and they'd been financially penalised as a result. We do not know if there was a last minute concern about the revised functionality that caused TfL to pause for 7-10 days before making a public statement. It is worth noting that a TfL paper did give the date on which the change was supposed to happen. Something similar also seems to have happened with a disconnect in the timing of announcements about revisions to Crossrail access to Heathrow and then announcing the wider timetable improvements on services heading west.

It is perfectly clear that first generation cards will keep working until they naturally expire. However they will have less functionality and they are apparently somewhat less secure. On this basis it is clear that TfL will want to get as many withdrawn and swapped out as possible. I have such a card for residual PAYG trips and there is an added pain for me in that I have a discount set on the card that has to be set by a LU member of staff. My card gets very low usage so it's no great hardship if it's not swapped out as I will never trigger a daily nor weekly cap.

I think your predictions on weekly capping are wrong. It would not be tenable for TfL to create a system that deliberately took the worst case in terms of zone coverage and charged people that weekly rate if most trips were on a much shorter geographic spread of zones. The system has long been capable of determining the lowest day zonal cap and coping with the occasional out of zone trip. The weekly Oyster capping process would an extension of that logic but it will have to work much harder in determining the cheapest charge if people have disparate travel patterns. I have not heard of any great complaint from anyone about how weekly capping works with Contactless. If mass mischarging was going on it would have been spotted by now and TfL / the Mayor would have been called out on it by London Assembly members. They tend not to miss things like this.

I actually think the biggest challenge is the largely unstated one - moving from a system where people have absolute flexibility as to the start date of any season ticket to one where capping is within a fixed Monday to Sunday capping period. Getting that across to people is, to my mind, the biggest issue as it determines how people are charged. If you are regular commuter with fixed journey patterns there may be few issues but any great variation will complicate matters. I also happen to think it is a very poor retrograde step but I do understand why TfL has opted to draw some clear lines to define the capping period. The issue remains, though, that the defined period may not work for a sizeable proportion of people.

It is an issue, because it creates stress and uncertainty.

NR (Well, SE at the minimum) have quietly withdrawn the ability to purchase open returns from the ticket machines. They have also instigated a policy of not selling anything other than singles on train if the is a ticket purchasing facility at the entraining station. They also often close the ticked offices with no prior warning.

This means that, for (financial) safety's sake, you need to purchase your ticket on the internet (or make a trip to the station a day or two before hand).

The problem here is that the NR ticketing site, to all appearance, will not sell you an open ticket, but only one on a specified out train and a specified return train. This is what it says on the purchase page, the confirmation page, and the email confirmation.

Cue concern about what happens if you can't make either of the specified trains.

Of course, once you actually get the tickets printed you see that the outgoing ticket is valid on any train on the day specified and the return on any day for a month.

Now, I know all and sundry will wade in with "Well, you can phone here, look there, write to your MP, etc.", but the point is people should not need to go through shenanigans just to check they have got what they wanted/paid for/expected.

It's very poor practice for anyone to offer a service where only those in the know are aware of the full range of options for what they pay for.

While I understand your concerns re South Eastern I do not see the parallel with TfL. TfL are making the system vastly more flexible for people and removing a significant "pain in the posterior" for those using online services. This is reflected in the relatively low take up rates of internet based ordering of PAYG / Travelcards to date. Expect this to change hugely as the next phases of improvements kick in.

On the other hand South Eastern have made life vastly more complicated with little publicity. I understand their decisions are probably in breach of the "spirit" of NR ticketing rules if not the actual rules when studied in micro detail. However it is South Eastern you're talking about - a company whose reputation is "in the gutter" along with Govia bed fellows GTR. And as the posting axe is no doubt hovering over these words I shall stop there.