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Comment by defaulty | Hacker News Reader

> This has led to a growing colony of Oyster cards that haven't been used for at least a year - about 82m of them - and passengers' cash in the coffers of Transport for London (TfL) totalling more than £550m.

I would assume that TfL is investing that static £550m. Even at a 1% gain annually, that's a nice chunk of profit from sitting on Oyster cash

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I guess that's never money that they need to pay out to anyone, so there's no difference if someone "uses" the money on the Oyster or not

I don’t know how many people know this, but the balances on Oyster cards are refundable[0], so it is possible that they would indeed need to pay it out.

[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay...

And the cards themselves are worth a £5 deposit. (Clever IMO - ever seen one littered?)

Sort of. Before February 2020, most (but not all) Oyster cards had a £5 deposit. However, Oyster cards issued since then do not have a deposit (there is instead a £5 fee for the card).

For older Oyster cards that have a deposit, you can still reclaim that £5.

Oh interesting, thanks for the correction. Will be interesting to see if I start to notice them when I (and people who might drop them) are out more.

The fee/deposit payment is part of it (prevention, it not seeming a disposable item) but with a deposit (there's no good way to say this..) there's also the incentive for the homeless or otherwise desperate to clear them up, since there's some guaranteed value. (Which could be a bit less than £5 due to negative get-me-home-at-night balance, but I don't think it's allowed to go as far as -£5, so a card with a deposit on it is always an asset.)

Even so, the proportion of refunds paid because someone requested one, vs. the number of cards that were lost/destroyed in the laundry/fell through the cracks means that they could keep some fractional amount on hand for those potential payments, and transfer the rest as "found money" to an operating account.

The pandemic could explain this, a lot of people are now reluctant to use public transport at all.

Have you actually been on the underground lately? It's just about as busy as it ever was.

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