TfL's simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
Other then that I just used my Oyster card. I don't live in London any more, but I've been back for visits/work and I've had no issues using Google or Apple Pay for contactless tap ins/outs - it's all very seamless. It's really impressive tbh and it's a shame this sort of system isn't rolled out to other cities in the UK, or at least is has patchy support.
Since when as that's actually illegal for the NS to do. (It doesn't)
From the ovpay.nl website: "En de prijs? Die is hetzelfde als reizen met je OV-chipkaart."
So mobile payments, the blue card and the yellow card without season tickets are operationally identical from the user's standpoint?
- Automatically adding money to the card's balance when it runs low
- Getting back the money on the card when it expires
- Senior discounts for people over 65
- Being able to add a subscription when you do want one for a while
Further expansion will be dependent on government funding.
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?
Oyster will invalidate this card (until I pay off the balance), its balance is now hugely negative, but obviously I'm not going to pay off that balance, so I effectively got (most of) a free journey.
At London scale this feels pretty OK. In London a typical Oyster journey is cheaper than a pint of beer, if somebody "owes" you a pint of beer and then you never see them again you probably aren't bent out of shape about that. But Nationally it's a much greater cost. What if I travel from St Ives to Wick? That's going to be pretty expensive, but somehow we need to accept that I entered at St Ives (maybe for a local journey?) and yet might get out at Wick (the far end of the country) and if I don't have the money for this long journey all of that risk burden lands on... the fare operator? The government? The credit card company? Nobody wants that burden.
So long as the train isn't entirely full and you're taking up a seat that could be used by someone else, the marginal cost (in fuel, maintenance, etc) to the train operator of having an additional person on the train is very close to zero. The train is going from St Ives to Wick anyway; if you do what you describe, the train operator is in essentially the same situation as if you had simply decided not to take the trip.
So as long as the fares that are actually paid are sufficient to operate the train and pay wages to the employees, the train operator can absorb the handful of people who do what you describe. As long as most people don't cheat the system in that way, it's easier to simply ignore.
That would be a rare exception to the rule. Almost all public transport systems run at a loss and rely on public subsidy; revenues lost through fare evasion increase the burden on the taxpayer.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/...
Passenger revenue is TfL's largest source of income by some distance, but it's nowhere close to enough to pay for the entire network, let alone the necessary capital investments to grow and change with the city. And of course if prices went up, ridership would fall, and transport would be diverted to the over-stretched and polluting private transport options which the city does not want.
It's possible to set an anonymous card to a high advance payment (600kr = 80€), and then use it to travel across the country.
Great Britain is significantly larger, has much higher train fares, and isn't neatly divided into islands. They could limit it to contactless credit/debit cards, but I don't see a neat way to extend Oyster over the whole country.
After the French ticketing system, this felt magical to me.
Ticket inspectors used to mark the tickets so they'd know if someone was reusing a ticket. Originally it would be clipped, then date stamped, and towards the end on South West Trains it was a scribble of biro (or black marker if you were unlucky).
On the occasional trips I take I now use an e-ticket. I have never had the QR(ish) code on it scanned for validity.
London → Clapham Junction → many more stops → Hassocks → Brighton.
A safer option: buy an open return ticket London → Brighton. The London→Brighton bit is only valid that day, but the Brighton→London bit is valid for 30 days. Get through the barriers at Brighton with a Brighton→Hassocks ticket. Show the return ticket as required to the ticket inspector on the train, and use a Clapham Junction→London ticket to exit the station (the barrier swallows this used ticket).
Wait, if you already have a Brighton→London return ticket, why would you bother to buy Brighton→Hassocks and Clapham Junction→London tickets? Couldn't you just use the Brighton→London return ticket?
Let's say I get on and 'tap in' at London Euston then travel to oxenholme (no ticket barriers, but a 2-3 hour £60 trip) if I don't tap out what should I be charged? This would have to be the same amount as if I travelled one stop on the tube in London and forgot to tap out. What if I tapped in at London got off the train after one stop and tapped out without leaving the station then continued my journey?
What minimum amount should my oyster card (or debit card) have on it in order to take a tap in? It would have to be ~£2.55 as that's the minimum fare; yet once in I could take a £200 train journey.
A big part of why the London system works is that it's quite literally small beer. The journey price range is something like £2.55-£9; in that case you can afford to do all sorts of things like have someone tap in with £2.55 on thier card and tap out with a negative balance, and generally cope with a small number of edge cases and loopholes that are an inherent part of providing contactless travel.
Is there a person or machine who physically inspects the ticket before you board each train? Or is it that the person who sold you the ticket is probably going to be able see if you physically go to the wrong train for the ticket you just bought and yell if you go to the wrong one? Or is it that for most folks, the act of talking to a physical person keeps them honest even if they could lie and buy a cheap ticket but board an expensive train? Or something else?
When tapping a smart card you don't specify the exit because that's exactly the thing that makes it a faster/more convenient method of payment. There is no way to check whether you intend to pay until you exit, and then it's already too late unless a physical barrier is present at every station.
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.
It’s fair the assume that passengers are going to “learn” about this and try again next time in a different route, only to arrive at a destination that doesn’t support it.
There are edge cases, but, they're literally edge cases, they're at the edge. Example, suppose I'm in central London and I want to go to Amersham. That's a Tube station, it's notionally in London for this purpose so my contactless just works. How about if I travel slightly further along that line, to Great Missenden? That's no longer in London, contactless is unavailable.
But, why would I expect Missenden would work? It's not in London, it's not shown on a Tube map or a TfL London map, Amersham is (right at the top left) but Missenden isn't, because it's not in London by this definition, you have finally left.
Could I be confused because I'm on a tube train? Nope. Tube trains don't go that far, they don't go beyond Amersham on that line. Once upon a time you could get tube trains out to Missenden (we're not talking last week, this is when they were steam trains like 60+ years ago) but not any more. So I have to have boarded a full size train, probably bound for Aylesbury, or Birmingham or something, and thought "I bet this is a London train and my London fare system applies". That's very silly.
You'd also have to pay a default charge for an incomplete journey on the PAYG ticket, but you could potentially appeal to have this reversed.
It's usually made pretty clear on train announcements that you're leaving the contactless PAYG fare zone.
How is an announcement then supposed to help, since you'll have already bought your ticket before you hear it?
You would have some time to accept whatever is coming and make peace with it
So there's an announcement. Your Oyster (or contactless) is not valid for travel beyond London, and this train isn't even really for internal travel, but you can leave at Clapham Junction.
I've done this myself a couple of times - touching in at my local station whilst half-asleep on a journey to Luton Airport Parkway when on my way to catch an early flight.
What happens then is that TFL record an touch-in without a corresponding touch-out, and so might charge you the maximum fare for an unresolved journey.
They're actually pretty good at fixing that automagically - so if, for example, you've not touched out at a station that had its barriers open due to crowding and make a return journey through the same station later in the day, they'll assume that you exited there and charge you the right fare.
But if it's not fixed within 48h, you can claim a refund at https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements
If a station is overcrowded, the barriers are ought to delay the passengers to prevent overcapacity, not waive the fares.
This would be a smart card that can hold a credit balance and also season tickets, so it is not necessarily PAYG.
However, there are two types of such smart cards, Oyster cards issued by TfL, and ITSO cards issued by other train operating companies. Both can store season tickets for journeys within London. But only Oyster cards can be used for PAYG within London and only ITSO cards can be used for PAYG outside London and store season tickets involving journeys outside London.
Aside from that, QR codes are yet another form of ticket for National Rail trains, and they work in some stations in London and not others.
Which National Rail stations in London don't accept the barcoded tickets? I'm especially curious to know what happens if you attempt to purchase a barcoded ticket ('E-Ticket' in National Rail parlance) to one of these destinations.
The ticket machines at this station are also the same type as in non-National Rail stations, and they do not let you print pre-booked National Rail train tickets.
In my experience, if you try to book a National Rail ticket to West Ham, it will not offer you the option of a barcoded ticket.
Jesus wept.
Though only on a fixed Monday to Sunday period. So if you arrive and depart mid-week, you might pay up to an additional capping period and buying a weekly travelcard could work out cheaper (provided you know in advance which zones you need).
A travelcard also lets you buy slightly cheaper rail tickets for travel outside of the TfL zones (tickets to/from "Boundary Zone n", with n being the last zone in which your travelcard is valid), whereas with contactless the same trick requires physically getting off the train.
On the other hand, these types of popups can be incredibly disruptive to the UX, especially if the text is badly written, and there's no clear utility to the user. All too frequently, these types of guardrail popups are there, only to advance the agenda of the developer/service provider, and not the end-user.
It looks like the popup was well-designed, the text was well thought-out, and the user advantage is clear.
I feel that so many tech companies consider their end-users to be little more than cattle herds (the real product is the company), and they simply don't think about stuff like this.
This kind of usability is a basic, fundamental mindset, that, in my opinion, seems to be severely lacking, in today's tech industry.
The text simply say's it's cheaper, but the amount saved is not mentioned. This can be a big factor in changing people's behaviors. I may choose to shop at a local market for convenience, or fly a specific airline to get airline miles. In both cases, I know that I did not pay the absolute rock bottom price, but that the difference is small enough to not deter my loyalty.
Later in the article an example is given: "...Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments" I am unsure how random that example is, but if typical, that is a massive 60% discount. Sharing that sort of precise information would certainly change habits of even the most loyal of paper customers.
It is of course far simpler (and cheaper) from a software design perspective to have the generic message, and perhaps it is all that could be accomplished in the timeframe allotted to the effort, and I understand that. But I do hope that more precise messaging is provided in the future so that we can revisit this discussion and review the results.
So if you buy a paper ticket at 0925, you’ll pay 6.70 GBP. If you touch in and travel immediately you’ll pay 3.40 GBP (peak fare), but if you stop for a coffee first and the time ticks over past 0930 before you touch in, you’ll get the off-peak 2.80 GBP fare.
(I think there is actually a little grace time, and it may be when you complete the journey which matters, but the principle holds).
The entire thing screams back-end developer forced to make UI :)
> ...an off-peak trip from Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments.
Is the inference that a single magnetic strip paper ticket costs ~£3.90 per printing? Did TfL reduce the volume of magnetic paper it bought (in relation to this change)? I don't see either of these points mentioned, anywhere in the article.
If it's not that expensive to print on magnetic paper, and TfL has not reduced the volume of the magnetic paper it buys (in relation to the change) then the dramatic price fall seems a bit suspect to me - but maybe that's just me?
Cf the guns on the Zumwalt class destroyers.
Ticket machines take cash and that cash needs to be securely transported. Similarly a paper ticket needs to be collected for possible auditing later.
Contactless is much easier since all the records are digital and the user carries their card with them.
The value of having just one kind of ticket (for most uses) with a fixed price is surprisingly high, since you can even pre-purchase a bunch of them if you're an occasional rider. Then riding on the train without a card is: get ticket from wallet, stamp it, wait for train, get on train. The stamping machine doesn't seem very expensively complicated, though it does know the current time to within 15 minutes.
Subscription tickets (monthly fee, unlimited travel) are RFID cards and ticket controllers have suitable readers. Obviously most travelers are ones who travel often and therefore bought subscription tickets, and few stamping machines are needed, for the occasional travelers who didn't. The process is: go to train platform, wait for next train, get on train.
They don't do credit card taps here probably because German people are resistant to electronic tracking of people's movement (you know, after that big thing the government did some time ago). If they did, they'd probably have a place to tap your card in each station to validate it for the next 2 hours, same as a paper ticket, and then the ticket controller's handheld scanner would check where it was last tapped.
Additionally (though I don't know that it's relavent to the two figures you quoted), the paperless system is flexible in that it can measure all the journeys you take in a calendar day and then charge you whatever the lowest suitable fee is at midnight - whether that's a single or a return or a day pass or an off peak something or so on. Whereas with paper tickets the person needs to decide up front which option will be cost effective based on the trips they're expecting to take, which often is a cause of paper TFL tickets working out more expensive also.
You can't make any assumption or inference about anything based on the price presented to you in a given context.
This is likely going to be an issue in this year's UK election. The only people who are happy about this is train operators who profit from customers getting bad deals.
At first glance TfL makes more profit on paper tickets, but if it deters more people from using the metro at all then it's a loss.
Suppose you enter at Upminster and leave at Moor Park, those are both in Zone 6. But by default the system will conclude that you probably passed through the core (Zone 1) since that's the obvious route and charge you for a journey using zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
If you're on a budget and no time constraint, you can travel to Barking, get out, touch the Pink validator, board a train to Gospel Oak, touch another Pink validator, and now finish your journey to Moor Park, and since you've avoided the core you're charged a significantly lower fare (but this takes much longer).
Before Oyster this couldn't work, you weren't allowed to travel on the cheap fare via the core, but there was no way to detect that you'd done it - the tickets don't know where they are, so people routinely did and may not even have realised what they were doing wasn't legal. But because Oyster (and thus also contactless fare system) knows the journey you made, it can conclude that (unless it saw you at the Pink validator on a different route) you went the obvious way and should be charged accordingly.
For most people this just made things slightly fairer. For a handful of people who liked cheap weird routes or are in no hurry it added a step (touching the pink validator).
You might be able to buy either a peak or off-peak paper ticket, but you have to choose.
If you make the wrong decision, you'll end up paying £3.90 too much. With contactless, you literally can't make the wrong decision (you pay the fare at the moment you're riding the train, so it can charge you accordingly)
Basically they are different classes of tickets, it's not really to do with the paper.
For the same reason that we need cash, we need to keep paper tickets at least as an option. I'm surprised the sentiment in this thread is so strongly in favor of cards; normally HN is a bit more cash-friendly.
Neither has a credit/debit-card based viable solution at present that'd be tolerable.
For what its worth, you can use Leap for Bus Eireann and other services[1].
I think Irish Rail (excluding the Free Travel Scheme[2]) is the hold-out, in rural areas, as Bus Eireann and Irish Rail are the only services available in those areas.
While not the contactless payment scheme inferred from the article, it would still be a viable alternative to paper tickets.
[1] - https://www.transportforireland.ie/fares/leap-card/
[2] - https://www.gov.ie/en/service/9bba61-free-travel-scheme/
Edit: formatting
[1]: https://www.ns.nl/binaries/_ht_1583338071691/content/assets/...
[2]: https://mastodon.social/@rubenivangaalen/109705862906000821
This ought to be incredibly rare, but if you actually do literally run out of battery (not just it gets to the last few percent) then this technology doesn't work, whereas your bank cards do.
While I believe you're correct for the iPhone, that it won't work, it's actually not as impossible as you suggest. The NFC-capable BlackBerrys that supported the very early tap-to-pay with a phone had the concept of a default card, which could be programmed onto the secure element and would work even if the phone was totally dead (even if the battery was removed). The NFC field was enough power to boot up the secure element, just like it's enough power to run the chip in your bank card when you tap it.
Later phones dropped this support, as it took a bunch of engineering effort and customers largely didn't care. But if customers ever start demanding it, so they can totally stop carrying a bank/credit card, it is possible.
So you'd have to message this very carefully, on top of the engineering effort, and my guess is that in reality "Reserve power" is always enough. If your phone "died" (screen turned off for lack of power) at the party, you have several hours after that when it can still do enough NFC to get on the bus home.
A lot of my friends get anxious at like 10%. Sure, at that point you should probably stop playing Candy Crush, but you're a long way from not being able to tap in to your train home if you stop. Power Reserve seems like a sensible choice to make you stop using the last dregs for frivolities.
https://support.apple.com/en-is/guide/iphone/iph0475909d4/io....
I would assume contactless payments are easier to surveil compared to paper tickets, similar to cash vs credit card payments.
I doubt this really affords you any extra anonymity though. Tube and rail stations are so heavily covered by CCTV, and the police have many times tracked peoples entire commutes and movement through CCTV only.
The system breaks down when one guy stops topping up their card knowing they can be a prick about it :)
Also, contactless prepaid cards can be anonymous if don’t register them or attach to credit card filling with cash. Can even swap them around with other people.
It also explains why the rail operators are moving to QR codes on paper tickets, which are in every respect worse. (They are absurdly large tickets and take much longer to scan at the barrier, creating queues.)
Suppose I'm at this screen about to get myself a paper ticket to Brixton to see my friend Jim, as this prompt appears I see Jim - oh that's right, Jim is coming here we're not meeting in Brixton. Cancel. I'm not making a journey, I don't want to "use contactless" I want to cancel this purchase, and that's exactly what this option does.
Yes most users who choose to cancel might end up using contactless, but that's not what the choice itself does, it does not, for example, check that you're carrying some form of contactless payment, nor does it charge you for a journey, it just cancels the ticket purchase.
Ok, maybe my suggestion is the wrong wording but I still think the original is confusing. If I'm going throught a process and suddenly get a confusing popup I didn't expect, my first instinct is I can press cancel and get back to what I was doing. But in this case it takes me out of the whole process.
But I'm not saying my UI choices are representative of all - really, it's about proper UI testing. The article doesn't say what user testing they did, if any.
I guess this falls into the trap a lot of tech metrics stuff falls into: ok, we can clearly show that sales of paper tickets fell. We assume there is a corresponding rise in card sales (But crucially, the article doesn't prove that). But what none of the stats can clearly show is whether people were happy with all this or not. Maybe they would have preferred the cheaper prices AND a paper ticket.
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
Let‘s say you have:
1 contactless bank card, 1 iPhone, and 1 Apple Watch
These count as three different cards and would therefore allow you to pay for your own fare and two additional people.
If you have more than one card you can let others in your group use those.
Though it’s been a few years since I was travelling with anyone who didn’t have either a contactless card or Apple Pay / the Android equivalent, which also works and is arguably even more convenient.
For myself, I just swipe my mobile and I am done. For my child tried:
- Registering in the TfL mobile app doesn't work for children
- An Oyster Card for children should exist but we were told to get a paper ticket instead - at multiple TfL counters.
- Tried to swipe twice, for my child and myself. Did not work - unsurprisingly.
- Trying to get a paper ticket for a child leads to the mentioned pop-up, which says: "It's cheaper to use contactless [..] at adult rate [..]". What is that supposed to mean when trying to buy a ticket for a child? Is the contactless adult rate still cheaper than a paper child ticket? If not, then why am I seeing this pop-up?
So for our next visit: What is the proper way to travel with a 12 year old child as a tourist?
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel/11-15-zi...
The other option is a child's paper ticket - those can be purchased without having to apply for anything in advance.
Adult fares via Oyster/contactless may still be cheaper than a child's paper ticket.
You can use the Single fare finder to check the price of a specific journey - for both adult/child:
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/find-fares/tube-and-rail-fares/sing...
If the Oyster/contactless adult fare is cheaper than a child's paper ticket, you could just use a standard Pay as you go Oyster card:
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
If we assume that an Oyster card for children doesn't make much sense for a tourist, I found no option where the child is cheaper than the adult.
Admittedly, most often the difference between contactless for the adult and the pay-as-you-go Oyster card is negligible. Still it is a bit disappointing.
If you look around when walk through a TfL station you’ll noticed that all the infrastructure is setup to make sure there’s more provisions for exiting a station, than entering the station. So the gates are setup to have more exit gates than entry gates, escalators set are always configured to have more up escalators than down escalators, routes through the station are more direct for exiting than entering etc.
TfL takes overcrowding extremely seriously, and have loads of provisions and strategies to prevent an overcrowding issue.
That's required because people tend to trickle into the station over time but flood when a train arrives.
Personally I am still a paper ticket person, psychologically I need that bit of paper.
Top tip if visiting the UK and going outside London with a ticket bought online or with an app - always screenshot your purchase!
There is an interesting lesson in that on the nature of metrics.
That's insane. It feels like some kind of dark pattern that they were even offering paper tickets.
In my case:
A paper ticket is simpler and quicker to buy, and I can wait until I am reasonably convinced trains are running before buying.
Scanners for e-tickets don't work. Every day I see people fighting with them with their smartphones while I just wizz past.
Sometimes "old tech" just works.
(I use TfL trains but not tube so infrastructure is shared with other operators in standard train stations. It may work better in the tube)
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.
New tech wins on the tube.
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
Also how is buying a paper ticket faster and easier than just tapping your card at the gate line? You can even wait till you know your train is going to arrive before tapping!
The whole machine is a giant popup, you walk up to it with the intent to buy something.
> We value your privacy
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/return-to-office-work...
Wednesday
And
Thursday
Not to be confused with those who only come to the office on the last three days of the week - the WTFs.
I now just always tell people to just tap in with their phone.
I miss the ones from the south east that had physical buttons and very few options.
Brighton button, Day Return button, insert cash, done. Even was visible in bright daylight, what a marvel.
If you're going to put a touchscreen on something, you might as well do it properly! :)
Now we get to stand there tapping 13 times because the touchscreen sucks. And worry about being taken to court because the machine was broken. Yes "most" people have phones but public transport needs to cater to all
Obviously that one was well maintained as the touchscreen was calibrated correctly. But old machines used to be broken too.
If you want a ticket to say Gloucester from Stafford then it's something like "other, g, l, Gloucester, Offpeak return, tap phone". The old style physical machines wouldn't sell a ticket to anywhere other than a few locations.
Ticket desks worked/better in bright light, if you're blind, deaf, unfamiliar with the machines, wanted to pay in cash etc etc
I disagree the machines are not needed. Often when it comes to the railway people argue for things that conveniently ignore edge cases and pretend public transport isn't for all the public. Our railway system is incredibly complicated.
If your habit is to arrive in good time, or using the tube where there’s another one along in 2 minutes, you might never see a queue.
(I was in Lisbon recently, and am convinced that that was going on there; there was no possible reason for the ticket machines to be so awkward to use, other than deliberate deterrence.)
Which is also how it _should_ work.
Of course seniors, kids, period tickets etc are always going to be messy but at least describe the base case: single journey adult - what do I need to do?
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.
The big revolution elsewhere was the transition from RF based ticket cards to RF based regular credit/debit cards. They’re both “contactless” though but one is s a hassle.
London had RF ticket cards (Oyster card) since 2003, EMV payments since 2012.
[1] https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/emv-contactless-chip/
The constant reference to “Oyster cards” for 20 years without specifying that “yeah that’s codespeak for ticket” was a very similar UX failure. They should have called them the 3 seashells…
Conactless cards includes those (but your Orca card probably doesn't work in London...) and credit/debit cards, and your phone if that's how you roll.
Not every credit/debit card includes contactless yet, afaik, telling people they can just use their credit card when there's no way to swipe or insert is going to lead to confusion and delay at the entrance gates.
With validity of credit cards being <5 years you’d think we are at 100% now having no magnetic strip. Perhaps cards issued in some countries do have magnetic strip (but hopefully 100% have contactless too)
I had never heard the word tannoy. The Internet informed me about the British loudspeaker company Tannoy.
By the way, their Wikipedia article says their lawyers watch out for people using their trademark as a generic word and chase them down.
This is all very well but what happens if you have no phone, or it's just been lost, or you left it at home? What happens if there's no credit and you thought there was?
And what happens if you've only cash and or you're a visitor who doesn't know the system and only wants a once-off one-way ticket? And why should one have to top up a card for a once-off journey (how does one recover the residual funds and or how much does the System rake off because residual amounts are too difficult to redeam)?
These systems work for the cognoscenti who know both the system and the workings of their phone but little thought is given to those who don't or when the system breaks down.
Let me give you an instance, I often use a feature/dumb phone and I deliberately do not have a Google account (or any accounts other than the phone number itself) on my smartphone.
Why should I be forced to comply and be spyed on by Google et all just to get a rail ticket which people have done without difficulty for over 150 years?
Initial authorization only takes £0.10 and is there to validate your card is active.
The actual charge gets applied 24h later and can overdraw even an account with no arranged overdraft through a transport-only exception with the card networks.
In the end it means you only need 0.10£ to travel for 24 hours, and can keep doing so as long as you fund your account before the initial 24h period (if you fail and it declines it'll retry up to a few days, and there's a way to make it retry online - until it succeeds, that particular card will get refused at the barriers).
As a commuter there I'm sorry, but I'd rather have saved a few quid a month on my ticket than pay for some tourist who can't figure out a credit/debit card despite travelling to one of the world's most expensive cities.
150 years ago you could lose a paper ticket or leave it at home, or it could have been out-of-date when you thought it wasn't, and you'd also be walking.
150 years ago was 1874. Although printed tickets were well and truly established by this point, buying tickets from the conductor was also common. So perhaps you would not be walking home?
These issues are not just 'what ifs' but actual problems for a significant percentage of the population, and it's simply discrimination to ignore these people.
For example, a personal instance: I live in Sydney and only last Thursday, I needed to top up the credit on my equivalent of London's Oyster card (which we copied) and I went to the only machine on Central Station's Grand Concourse only to find that it refused to read three brand new $50 bills (each bill was inserted multiple times and rejected). I then went to the nearby information centre where each of the three persons in the booths had a sign in front saying 'no cash accepted.' I was then told that except for the machine that the Station did not take cash and to top up the card with cash that I had to go to independent shops which were technically outside the Station's precinct.
Frankly, that's a fucking outrageous situation. The Government still issues cash as legal tender, and yet the main railway station in Australia's biggest city won't take cash for a ticket. Keep in mind Central Station is not [yet] run by private enterprise but by the NSW State Government!
BTW, I am no Luddite, I've worked in high tech for years. In fact, I ran the IT Operation for a Government Department [so I'm well acquainted with the ways of bureaucracy], and the rude awakening one has in such a job is that tech that's seemingly straightforward for most people and certainly a no-brainer for technical people—and of course those 'selling' the tech—is actually a problem for a percentage of the population. In fact that percentage can be typically as high as 15%.
If you think this 15% of the population should be relegated to a Soylent Green - like solution then that's your prerogative but it's certainly not mine.
As tech becomes more advanced this dichotomy will become even more pronounced and unless taken into account then social disruption could easily result. (I know this message isn't popular with tech elites—as witnessed by those who down-voted my original comment—but shooting the messenger won't solve anything.)
If you're in tech then you ought to take cognizance of these issues.
If you have neither, pay cash.
I don’t think GP’s comment constitutes an official declaration from TfL. You’re free to continue living life the way you want.
Also, no-one is forcing you; the ticket machines still _exist_.