[Gllug] Oyster cards vulnerable?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 02:28:28AM +0000, Nix wrote:
> On 25 Jan 2008, Daniel P. Berrange outgrape:
> 
> > On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 11:24:39PM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> >> There has to be some reason why paper tickets suddenly became so
> >> expensive.  It's not because paper itself is more expensive than the
> >> fancy cards.  It can't be because of the cost of hauling cash around
> >> (people still pay for their Oyster top-ups using cash).
> >
> > They delibrately made the paper tickets more expensive to "force"
> > people to switch to Oyster so they could then track you ;-)
> 
> There was another very important reason: it hugely improves flow around
> ticket barriers if most people use Oyster, because it takes a fraction
> of the time to validate the card as it does to feed a ticket through.
> (Normally about a fifth as long.)

Yes that's actually a good point - I silently swear at people in front of
me who still use a paper ticket because they force me to break my stride
when walking through! They recently introduced similar swipe cards
for the underground here in Boston, and managed to pick such an utterly
crap system that it takes > 1/2 a second to respond to you swiping your
card - it was actually quicker to just put the old style coin tokens in.
Ahh the joy of american public transport :-(

Dan.
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