Slashdot Mirror
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.