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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."
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
What are they supposed to do? "Oh, these people are all stupid. Lets chuck em out and get some better ones." The problem isn't that they can't solve the problem. The problem is, they're being employed to try in the first place. Raise taxes. Make public transportation absolutely free. Watch cars on the road go down. Watch societal energy requirements go down. Watch population redistribute themselves along the public transportation corridors, reducing energy requirements further. Watch everyone get that little bit richer as a consequence. Problems solved. The strategy makers are the problem.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
For the most part Oyster cards work extremely well. Two downtimes in several years isn't the worst thing ever considering the number of people with travelcards on their Oyster cards who are paying regardless of whether the system is up or down at a particular time.
Without Oyster the entire network would grind to a halt at peak hours due to added processing time (even to put a ticket through the tube gate machines, never mind queues and buying bus tickets instead of simply swiping).
There isn't any room to raise taxes right now, they've done it consistently over the past 11 years until people have very little spare cash. Anyway, Oyster works in London, which has the congestion charge for cars, so most people don't drive to work here if they don't have to. If they did they wouldn't ever get to work.
The only issue is the Oyster card hack, that took years to appear. But the track record is pretty impressive, so choosing them as the supplier seems quite a sensible solution to me. At least it wasn't one of the waste of time governmental contractors like EDS who just absorb public money in return for nothing or freedom-inhibiting systems.
Better not mention that this card will enable the authorities to track all travel.
I depend on the public transportation infrastructure of New York City, and I wish "the authorities" (ooo, spooky) would start tracking all travel here already.
Right now, what does the MTA know about subway usage patterns? They know how many people get into the system at each station (thanks to electronic fare control gates), and have a pretty good idea of how many people exit the system at each station (not all exit gates have counters attached), but they can only estimate what people are actually doing once they're in the system. From Grand Central, how many passengers are heading uptown vs. downtown vs. crosstown? What are their ultimate destinations, and what routes take them there?
If every passenger's entrance and exit points from the system were recorded individually, that data could be analyzed to make the entire system more efficient.
The problem is that London's transport system can't cope the the volume of passengers that use it at the moment. Make it free, and the whole system will completely melt down from the number of people using it.
Very few people drive to work in London, as parking is way more expensive than public transport, and there is congestion charge on top.
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.
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