There's a slight perverse incentive in that not having access to Contactless history makes it harder for the customer to see overcharging and to make claims for a refund.
The system as a whole seems to be designed to prevent overcharging at all costs. In situations where is ambiguous what you should be charged (there’s a number of interesting edge-cases), the system always charges you the lowest possible amount. Even in the event of user error (such as forgetting to tap-out), the system does it best the guess what you did, such as looking at your history and assuming you meant to tapped out at a station you normally use, or looking for a station where the gates where left open (due to a major event, overcrowding concern, evacuation etc), and assuming you left the system there.
The contactless system is substantially more capable for handling these issues correctly, and generally better at charging less, than the older Oyster system.
I'm very curious to know more about those edge cases.
Out of station interchanges effect make two sets of barriers behave like they’re part of the same physical station, allowing you to temporarily exit the system, re-enter, but only get charged once, as if you never exited the system at all.
On the old oyster system this plays very badly with how the system handles you tapping in and out at the same station, at the start and end of a single journey. The Oyster systems assumes that you’ve made two trips, and not tapped out one way, and not tapped in the other way, and thus charges you two maximum fairs. Normally this isn’t an issue, but with out-of-station interchanges, it’s possible for you make a journey, leave the station, re-enter the station 20-30mins later, for your return journey (say you went to pick something up, and then went straight home), get caught within the out-of-station interchange, which effectively connects your return journey with your outbound journey. On the Oyster system, the out-of-station interchange is implemented by the re-entry barrier basically updating your card so it looks like you never left the system at all, as a consequence, when you tap out at your home station, the tap-out barrier thinks you’ve made two trips without properly tapping in and out, and charges you two maximum fairs.
With the contactless system, every single tap in and out is recorded by the barriers in their backend system, and an end of day batch system then looks at all of your tap ins and outs, and computes your final fair. Because it can see every single tap, it’s capable of recognising that you made two legitimate journeys, that shouldn’t be linked to by the out of station interchange, and thus charge you two correct fairs. Unlike the Oyster system, which has to make fair charging decisions at each tap, and due to limited memory on the card, can’t accurately track every single tap, as a result it has to be more aggressive in it fair calculation approach, otherwise it would be trivial to exploit its limitations to defraud TfL.
Although even the Oyster system will try and correct these issues. There are batch jobs that run on all the uploaded tap data collected by the barriers themselves, and those jobs do their best to try and spot errors like this, and perform automatic refunds. But it harder to perform those refunds because somehow the system has to the get the data on to the physical Oyster card, which uploading the patch into the barriers the system thinks you’re likely to use, so your card can be patched on the tap there.
> The contactless system is substantially more capable for handling these issues correctly, and generally better at charging less, than the older Oyster system.
Nonsense, everyone with a railcard is routinely overcharged, by design.
"TfL said the amount refunded equated to less than 0.001% of annual fare £3bn revenue collected via pay as you go with contactless."
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel/national...
Oyster system is fundamentally limited by its use of stored values on the physical cards, making it hard for the system to correctly issues retroactive refunds. TfL does its best to automate this, if you regularly use the same station, buts it’s an imperfect system.
TfL have long acknowledged the issue with railcards, and not supporting them on contactless is hardly “by design”. It’s substantially harder to support railcards, and perform correct enforcement of them, with contactless cards. There’s no way of meaningfully marking a contactless card as being paired with a railcard, which would allow ticket inspectors to actually know that when performing enforcement. It would be come trivial for people to defraud TfL using railcards, if there was no mechanism for allowing spot checks on people travelling.
To make the argument that not supporting railcards is “by design”, you also need to explain why TfL accept railcards on the Oyster system. TfL are under no obligation whatsoever to support national railcards. So if the lack of support for railcards on contactless was a revenue maximisation choice, why don’t they just get rid of the railcard discount entirely?
I'm not sure I buy this. Aren't TfL given privileged access to be able to retrieve back the FPAN (or if not that, a customer-specific Payment Account Reference, as defined by EMVCo)? If they weren't, the Contactless travel history portal wouldn't be able to display travel journey undertaken using Apple/Google Pay - and yet this usecase does work, so clearly there is a capability to associate payments made using different DPANs and the underlying physical card and to recognise those transactions are belonging to a single customer.
Subsequently, there is clearly a customer-specific identifier that TfL could, if it desired to do so, tie together with a record which states the customer owns a railcard (after validating the railcard number using the National Rail API).
Why do you think RID2 wouldn't be able to ask a server to check this at inspection time?
Yes they are.
> Why do you think RID2 wouldn't be able to ask a server to check this at inspection time?
I don’t. But RID2 is brand new, and they only finished the complete rollout last year. I don’t know why you expect TfL to immediately start supporting railcards, and it doesn’t change the fact that for the majority of the time that TfL has supported contactless, it’s not been possible for them to validate railcard association with their original RID.
Nothing you’ve said in anyway support your original assertion that TfL’s contactless system was deliberately designed to not support railcards, and certainly doesn’t support your implied assertion that TfL doesn’t support railcards on contactless for nefarious purposes, as opposed to simply not having the technology developed.
Right, so when you said "there’s no way of meaningfully marking a contactless card as being paired with a railcard", there was nothing of substance to actually support that assertion.
What you've proven to me is that TfL are in exactly the position where they could deliver this if they wanted to and put their minds to it, but it nonetheless hasn't happened. Just like Oval (how late is that now?)
I am quite cynical about TfL, yes, and suspect that they just see this as likely to cause a financial hit when it comes to revenue, which is probably why it hasn't been prioritised. The status quo is a convenient one. I'm sure it'll happen one day when the tech debt of Oyster forces it to happen, but it won't be done proactively for passenger benefit.
Yes there is, if you bother to actual read my comment, you’ll note I was referring to the ability to store the railcard flag on the actual card, so it’s easy for the RID to know if person is travelling with a discount.
> What you've proven to me is that TfL are in exactly the position where they could deliver this if they wanted to and put their minds to it, but it nonetheless hasn't happened.
Well that’s simply not true[1]. Also you might have been aware of a recent global pandemic that occurred, and completely flattened TfLs finances, and has basically forced them to abandon any future looking projects, and focus on just keeping the lights on. You seem to expect an awful lot from a transport agency that just spent 3 years fighting for its own survival, while central government did everything in its power to destroy it.
> I am quite cynical about TfL, yes, and suspect that they just see this as likely to cause a financial hit when it comes to revenue, which is probably why it hasn't been prioritised. The status quo is a convenient one. I'm sure it'll happen one day when the tech debt of Oyster forces it to happen, but it won't be done proactively for passenger benefit.
That’s unfortunate, but it say more about you, than it does about TfL. Go and spend any serious amount of time in any other major city, and you’ll be much more grateful for what TfL provides. Even more so when you realise that TfL is the only transit agency in the developed world that is inexplicably required to cover all its costs from the fair box and advertising. Even US transit agency, in a country notorious for its strong cultural dislike for public transit, provides more government support to its transit agencies than the UK does to TfL.
[1] https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/more-railway-stations-a...
The switch on did not happen on September 22nd, 2024 - and the previous date in March was also missed.
Also, once again you seemed have forgotten that COVID happened 2020-2022. Are you also trying to seriously suggest that TfL pausing all non-essential services and projects during a pandemic was a nefarious act to avoid rolling out project Oval, and by extension avoid having to support railcards on contactless transactions?
You honestly don’t seem to have any real grasp of how long project like Oval actually take to implement. A large transport project overrunning deadlines by a few years is hardly unusual. It’s certainly no evidence of some grand conspiracy to avoid supporting railcards (which again, TfL are under no obligation to support anyway).
I'm suggesting it likely would've been delayed anyway, based on how the project was going prior to the cyber attack, and the cyber attack is the latest convenient reason for it not being rolled out according to the (already behind) schedule.
It's not just Oval, it very much appears from an external perspective that most projects that TfL touch don't get done on time or completed to the promised standard. There are countless examples, the 4G/5G coverage rollout on the underground is yet another: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/lu-elizabeth-line-4g-up...
It's tiresome to see repeatedly happening.
> You honestly don’t seem to have any real grasp of how long project like Oval actually take to implement
I don't think the timeframes in the original tender were that unrealistic, and to be clear, the tender was published well after the lifting of the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the UK. If TfL didn't think those timescales were realistic, it shouldn't have bid for the contract.
What I have heard are - if true - some truly ridiculous stories (manual fares data entry, instead of automated ingest of the NR fares data, which already has all of the PAYG fares) about how this is being implemented, which would explain a lot about some of the reasons behind the delays if correct. It's certainly not the fault of the TOCs involved, that's for sure.
> as long as you properly tap-in and tap-out
And this is far from straight forward everywhere. E.g. Waterloo & City at Waterloo and its lack of barriers
Some believe Waterloo is actually long-standing money-maker for TfL ...
> The system as a whole seems to be designed to prevent overcharging at all costs
But not the physical UX
Lack of barriers is to prevent overcrowding, and maximise passenger flow at one of the busiest stations in London. If you use that link regularly, then you don’t actually need to tap out at all. The contactless system will spot the missing tap-out, and automatically add a virtual tap-out for you at the end of the day.
> But not the physical UX
Including the physical UX. Lack of barriers is the exception, not the rule. If the physical UX wasn’t designed to prevent overcharging, then TfL wouldn’t bother installing so many purple interchange readers around the system, and keep reminding people to use them. The only purpose of those readers is to allow people to get a lower fair by demonstrating they’ve avoided zone 1.
Not always, you can still be charged a Zone 1 fare if you don't use a pink route validator to prove that you went around the outside of Zone 1.