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London's Oystercard Gets New Contract, But Same Suppliers
nk497 writes "Over the summer, the London travelcard ticketing system — called Oyster — fell over twice, forcing the transport authority to offer free travel to the six million Londoners using the system. After that, it cut its contract with the supplier of the system, a consortium called TranSys. But now, Transport for London has signed a new contract to replace the TranSys one — with the same two companies that made up the TranSys consortium. Sure, that should fix everything."
Like economists, weather forecasters and politicians (feel free to add to the list), no matter how bad IT people screw up they always can get rehired.
London needs help on their series of tubes.
Why do the cards need to be writeable in a way that can cause permanent damage?
2) The renegotiated contract includes 'significant savings'.
Sounds like the government decided five nines wasn't as important as cutting the bill in half... as well as one of the former parties to the contract. ;)
TranSys is a consortium of four global companies:
people seem more content than ever to hand over more and more of their rights and responsibilities to government bureaucrats. Nevermind bureaucratic incompetence and cronyism - that is nothing new. What does that say about people as a whole?
So, who here from London has the misfortune of having to use Bank or Monument Stations? I'm staggered how they can fuck something like replacing an escalator up.
Just for everyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, here's the lowdown:
TFL are replacing the escalators that connect Bank and Monument stations together. How long do you think this should take? 2 weeks? 1 month? Nope, here's how long:
18 months.
18 months to replace a fucking escalator. The building opposite where I work was put up quicker than that! Meanwhile, the poor bastards who have to use the station all have to walk down a corridor that's been designed to only take a 1/4 of the volume it's experiencing now.
I love the advert projectors too, especially the one they've placed right in front of the LCD screen so you can't tell when the next train is due.
Greed, nothing but.
Summation 2
The great ship Titanic certainly does seem to be on a much more even keel since we moved these deck chairs around...
Better not mention that this card will enable the authorities to track all travel. They have already got rid of paying by cash on a lot of bus routes, forcing cash payers to pay twice as much as the Oyster payers to "encourage" the card use. To aid this, they have recently got rid of the pre-pay paper *1 tickets under disguise of mass fraud *2. Also children under 16 get "free" *3 travel using Oyster whilst data is actually being secretly collected for the governments ID card system.
*1: They were offering travel using these tickets the same price as the Oyster system.
*2: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/faresandtickets/singlefares/2904.aspx
*3: Free as in other sucker taxpayers paid for their privilege.
Comments here that gripe about the UK, always seem to focus on privacy and the state. But transport in London and the rest of the UK is our real embarrasment.
Entirely foreign owned, manned by minimum-wage slaves who can't speak a word of English and run by greedy, grossly incompetent asshats the UK public transport system is a disgrace. It's a dirty, unreliable, overcrowded, polluting, expensive, piss poor apology for a public transport system. On a good day.
Roads and railways close at random. Everything is at a halt while speed cameras, penalty travel fines and congestion zones rob any traveller of money to feed the machine. We have a war on travel in the UK.
It has a staggering downtime. On any random day, particualrly at weekends, you will find whole subnetworks of the UK public transport system closed off due to 'engineering works'. You'll often get stranded in some back of beyond town and need to hire a taxi, hitch-hike, sleep in a hotel (or if you have no money in a station). Surely no other system in the world is this much of a fucked up, crumbling mess.
The airport and railway authorities are laws unto themselves, still wielding ancient bylaw legislation from the days when it was a National state run transport system. Passengers are just unwanted cattle. The fare structures are unfathomable, even if you have a degree in maths and logistics just try working out the best ticket to buy. They change the names of products and prices at random to stop any customers or intermediate sellers getting settled. They misrepresent contract law, making specious pseudo-legal announcements telling lies about where and when you must buy a ticket in order to maximise their profits. Station staff who could once help you have been sacked and replaced with machines and ticket barriers.
Lord only knows what it costs our economy! The UK government and the private companies that run our roads and railways are a complete and utter failure at transport policy. I honestly think they have an agenda to halt the entire country and make sure everyone stays in their homes.
a lot of people use the tube.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to subsidize it and make it 'free' to use.
The reason I bring this up is becasue I ahve seen instances where the fee's collects just barely cover the cost of collecting fees.
If your goal is to get cars off the road, this seems ideal.
Note: I know nothing about the London system, my experience is in areas in the US.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why has it suddenly gotten so bloody difficult?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I noticed that too in Toronto, but I also noticed that the escalators in a lot of other places (notably a bunch of Chapters locations, stores, etc) seemed to also break down quite frequently. The stores tended to get things fixed a bit faster than the TTC, but overall I'm wondering if there's a shortage of escalator repair-persons or perhaps the parts are in short supply (I've heard that many parts come from overseas - Germany I think - and are available only from a very small number of suppliers).
Two things
Over here it's called "Snapper" (continuing the nautical theme). I'm pleased to report that while it hasn't actually anything up much as originally intended, it hasn't slowed anything down either. In other words it's not a big shambling mess like the UK version.
I am still trying to figure out why they put it in in the first place, with its inspiration being plagued with issues.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
So the Transport organization formed a new contract with the same parties that failed them before. HOWEVER, the new contract is much more robust, with many more protections for the transport authority, and many more penalties for the provider if and when they fail.
So what exactly wrong with this? That someone who screwed up got a new contract?
Let me say that there are very few organizations that have the ability to deliver ANY service in this area. Having a contractor with a track record and some history of failure doesn't mean that the contractor aren't the best choice for the job.
Is this corruption or stupidity? Likely not. This is simple business.
Note: I know nothing about the London system, my experience is in areas in the US.
When it comes to transport, the UK has a lot of firsts. And especially, as that relates to rail transport.
Ever wonder why continental europe has sexy trains on two levels, but we don't in the UK?
Because our century and older railway bridges are too low.
We don't have steam trains any more, but our entire infrastructure was built around them.
Work on a London underground railway began in 1854 - although it wasn't really the London Underground till the 1930's.
should be free. It'd take a large, complex function out of running a transit system, and simplify travel. I wonder what percentage of a fare dollar goes to managing the fare collection?
Of course, outfits like the AAA don't like the idea of transit riders getting, er, a free ride. But you don't pay to drive on a freeway, and that's pretty expensive to keep up. You don't pay the cost of the pollution you emit either. A big city like London ought to do everything it can to reduce the impact of cars: the traffic, pollution, parking problems and so forth.
I'm not saying this is a solution for smaller cities , but for huge cities, especially old huge cities like London or New York, cars just aren't a reasonable solution to moving people around; the density of the cities makes them impractical. You could try to keep them out, of course, with high bridge tolls, but I think it makes much more sense to make public transit really, really easy to use: no fare zones, no fare cards, no toll collectors, nothing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As the saying goes, "citation needed" for your claims about mass transit systems in major U.S. cities.
New York City has an estimated 8.27 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City) and its subway/bus system moves an estimated 7 million people daily (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Transit_Authority). That's more than 8/10's of the population.
London != The UK.
In any other western nation venturing from one major city to another does not feel like riding off to the end of the world. Hell, Scots from the central belt will often wince at the mere through of going to Aberdeen (Europe's main Petrochemical Hub), never mind Englishmen 200 miles to the south. That is how bad the road and rail services are.
In any other 1st world country the vast cities of the North of England would be seen as an opportunity, with low land prices, housing prices and proximity to "major" cites and transport links. Due to poor infrastructure they are left to rot, with think-tanks suggesting relocating their entire populations to the south of England to be closer to London rather than bring the business and infrastructure to them.
That is how bad UK public transport is.
At least you weren't relying on Mornington Crescent
Squirrel!
The decision to cut the contract was made well before and unrelated to the couple of failures earlier in the year.
Like any PFI contract there is a break clause part way through to give an opportunity for re-negotiation. In this case the system has probably proved more successful than was envisaged more than 10 years ago when it was negotiated and with the benefit of hindsight TTL/TFL presumably felt there were some savings and better terms that could be negotiated. It also allows them to correct some oversights (like not owning the Oyster brand).
What would be your solution?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But this is too inconvenient, specially if you need a season ticket.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have lived in several countries and thus experienced various public transport systems.
If they stopped full lines of the underground, in lets say, Mexico City, the politicians in charge would walk out of their jobs faster than you can say London Olympics.
In Spain fast trains are contractually obliged to pay you back your money if they arrive late.
In Barcelona underground trains do not stop at 23:00 or 00:00 and continue until the small hours in the morning (it wasn't me who tried to sell London as a 24 hours city).
In Singapore you can check the departure time of the buses in computers. Needless to say they are very punctual.
Rail replacement bus service is great and all, but the Jubilee line, the newest part of the Underground system, has been closed goodness knows how many weekends this year and is scheduled to continue like that until next one.
Why do they need to do engineering works barely 7 years after the extension to East London was opened?
Very often you find that the Circle, parts of the Northern and Jubilee line. DLR and recently past of the train systems are all closed at the same time no matter what, very often on weekends when big events are taking place in town.
The Conservative governments must be blamed for the backlog in maintenance, after all it was famously Margaret Thatcher who said "there is not such thing as society" and "adults using buses are losers" (paraphrasing). But after 11 years of Labour one would expect that this problem would have been tackled committedely from the start, no the end of their administration.
If other countries can manage to provide maintenance to the rail and underground systems during the night, without blanket outages of services during the weekends, what is stopping London in particular and UK comapnies in general doing the same?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Honestly, I have lived and travelled extensively. The UK must be the only country in the world (ok, I don't know this, but golly, it feels like that) that closes the transport systems in Xmas and New Year's day.
And that is only for starters.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.