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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:
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.
The instances where the fee barely covers the cost of collecting are always in less urbanized areas. In major cities, like New York and London, the fees cover most of the cost of transportation. In fact one of the things NYC's MTA is always complaining about is that the State and Federal government give huge amounts to subsidize suburban and rural public transportation and give practically nothign to the city
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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.
At least you weren't relying on Mornington Crescent
Squirrel!