Excellent, I've been trying to figure this out; whether I will be able to just jump on/off using my debit (or Oyster) card as I currently do on the over/underground.
Any idea how far out of town this ticketing system will be usable? Will someone in Reading be able to use a contactless card without having to buy a paper ticket?
> Excellent, I've been trying to figure this out; whether I will be able to just jump on/off using my debit (or Oyster) card as I currently do on the over/underground.
Note that you can also use contactless or Oyster on National Rail within the zones, e.g. King's Cross to Alexandra Palace or Moorgate to Finsbury Park.
> Any idea how far out of town this ticketing system will be usable? Will someone in Reading be able to use a contactless card without having to buy a paper ticket?
At the moment no. One would hope that common sense will prevail.
The message says, in part, "No need to buy a ticket, just tap in on a card reader at the start of your journey and touch out at the end." The article goes on, "The Passenger Operated Machine (POM), to use the TfL name for the ticket machines, doesn’t show the pop-up for every journey that they can sell tickets for because not every destination accepts contactless PAYG tickets."
Does this mean that there are at least three ways to pay: contactless credit/debit card, contactless PAYG ticket, and paper/magnetic stripe ticket? If so, what happens if you use a contactless PAYG ticket to enter a station but find, at your destination, that this ticket is not accepted?
> There are of course no "scanners for e-tickets" on the tube and there's no world where buying a physical ticket for a tube journey is faster than using contactless at the gate.
The lack of scanners at Underground stations is a pain for cross-London journeys -- you can't get a ticket from say Milton Keynes to Tunbridge Wells on an e-ticket because it includes the cross-london element
> You can pay for someone else's travel with your contactless card or device if they're travelling with you. You need to pay for your own travel with a different card or device.
> But you can't take a ride on her bus with my smartcard.
Even if I put some money on that card, via her bus' payment system? As in, I go to a tfl ticket machine, touch, put money on, touch again and then I can use the card on the underground. Then I go to Southampton, go to a ticket machine, touch, put money on, touch again, then I can use the card on the Southampton's transit system.
London gets this (mostly) right, because there "contactless card" includes Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Maestro credit and debit cards, and smartphones with equivalent contactless payment. The local transport card (Oyster) is only needed for other fares (e.g. child-rate tickets) or season tickets of a month or longer.
Travel from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton airports is included in this.
(The only thing they could improve is the signage at Heathrow. They promote the expensive Heathrow Express train, when many people would be better taking an Elizabeth Line train on the same rails — 15 minutes slower and ¼ the price.)
(One more thing, last month they seem to have introduced a £5-£7 cost to get an Oyster card, which seems needlessly extortionate for visitors that do need them. Years ago it was a small deposit, which you could get returned in cash at the machine.)
> The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true
The article makes it sound like they don't show the message in this case
> The Passenger Operated Machine (POM), to use the TfL name for the ticket machines, doesn’t show the pop-up for every journey that they can sell tickets for because not every destination accepts contactless PAYG tickets, but those that can will get the message. Over time, as more National Rail stations are added to the contactless payments system, the ticket machines will be updated to include them in the messaging.
> As in, I go to a tfl ticket machine, touch, put money on, touch again and then I can use the card on the underground. Then I go to Southampton, go to a ticket machine, touch, put money on, touch again, then I can use the card on the Southampton's transit system.
Literally just tried this with the Southampton card in London against a tfl machine. No Dice.
>Very occasionally an inspector just holds a hand terminal to your card to check you paid.
For a ticket inspector, there is hardly any information to discern if a journey has been made when using a Contactless card. Furthermore, anybody who uses this method knows that it can be several days before a journey shows up on the list of transactions. Although, it is largely to do with how the TfL payment system was implemented, with Contactless being more of a hindsight. However, it is significantly better than nothing at all.
> Replacement of the Oyster card would be pretty cool, especially for tourists. Assuming they can still calculate the smartest price at the end of the day
It already works as an oyster replacement as it's the same technology for contactless cards. Contactless cards get the same fare caps as oysters
> Vs EMV-based systems like London where you have to stop and wait for the card reader
Throughput depends on the people being ready.
In London the TfL gates (both train/underground) have a delay on closing, so it's possible for the next person's pass (whatever it is) to be scanned before the gates close. At busy times there are enough people already ready with their passes that the gates don't shut at all between scans and there is steady flow of people passing through. It only fails when someone faffs a bit too long with their pass/phone/watch/etc and you get a temporary stall.
Even approaching a closed gate it's possible, with a bit of practice and an outstretched arm, to walk through without having to break stride.
You do have to be careful of some people intentionally using an invalid card, resulting in the gates closing, and the person behind them letting them through with their subsequent scan whilst being left at the gate themselves (easily solved by then going to see one of the gate operatives and explaining the situation).
The things that aren't quite there yet, in terms of speed, are the QR codes being used for digital rail tickets, they have a separate optical reader (obviously) that doesn't work quickly/easily enough to walk through without breaking stride as you have to faff with a piece of paper or your phone rather than a simple NFC.
This is in theory a problem with most ticketing systems: people can buy the wrong ticket and then get stuck on the way out. The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true (e.g. enter at Bond St with contactless or a single, go to Reading via Crossrail, go to Manchester via Cross Country). Depending on how naïve one seems and how far one goes beyond the contactless area, staff may be more or less sympathetic, as the sibling comment suggests. We ought to roll out contactless nationally, and hopefully this will happen under British Rail.
> Being able to pay through cards and phones is super convenient
I was very impressed by Sydney's train between the airport and city that can take assorted contactless payments at the turnstile. None of this figuring out how many zones I need a ticket for or buying a $20 card and only using $9.50.
> Yeah this info, very condensed, should just be on big signs at station. ”You can just tap your credit card and travel, no need to do anything else at all”.
This messaging is all over TfL stations and advertising. If you're stood at a London train or Underground stop for any length of time, you're likely to hear the overhead tannoy repeating a message about how convenient contactless cards are, and how they charge the same (cheapest) fare as the official Oyster system.
It's a testament to how hard telling people anything is, that having a popup on the ticket machine is still effective.
> If you use the tickets you pay more, if you don't register your card, good luck when something goes wrong with it(and it will).
Counterpoint: No it won't, necessarily. I've never had an issue with one of these IC cards (edit: in over 10 years of using them). I've lost one, that's it. I've lost more of the paper tickets _inside_ the station than that.
Do you have actual data on the failure rates of IC cards?
> Nowadays, the industry would very much like you to ditch your paper ticket in favour of a fancy mobile barcode one (or an ITSO smartcard2); not only do they not have to spend money on printing tickets but they also gain the ability to more precisely track the ticket’s usage across the network and minimise fraud.
And unsurprisingly only a subset of tickets are available on the apps. Therefore the government gets its “fare simplification” it’s so badly wanted, through the back door, in a sense, the harder it pushes mobile tickets
Eg rover tickets are not on the ticketing apps. These can be excellent value.
Edit: also the government very recently announced they are to scrap return fares. This will without a shadow of doubt increase prices for a great many journeys.
> Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency.
Sure, but is this a serious design pressure? I've been on a lot of EU train and trolley networks that have a POS terminal on the train for direct sales, which are already doing networking both for the card transaction and to issue the ticket.
(Again to be clear: I'm not saying a QR is better. But I don't think connectivity is a unique problem, since systems that use NFC without tying into payment cards are almost certainly using connectivity to make up for the lack of tamper resistance.)
Excellent, I've been trying to figure this out; whether I will be able to just jump on/off using my debit (or Oyster) card as I currently do on the over/underground.
Any idea how far out of town this ticketing system will be usable? Will someone in Reading be able to use a contactless card without having to buy a paper ticket?
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