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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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
Well, with a server-side solution, you just have to make sure that every turnstile can call a central server and process a transaction in less than 200ms. This includes the turnstiles in buses and in remote locations...
Truth is, every transportation system with more than a few fixed turnstile stores the rights of the user locally, in the smartcard chip. Of course, transactions logs are analysed every night and it is usually possible to detect incoherences between the values stored in the card and the reference value stored in the server. In that case, the ID of the misbehaving card is placed on a "hot list" and the card cannot be used anymore.
Of course, this works only if you use real cryptographic algorithms (like 3DES or AES) to protect the content of the card instead of relying on a vendor's snake oil.
Nobox: Only simple products.