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And Oyster card is just another ticket and it's up to the TOCs to read it.
Reader Malcolm Jarrett e-mailed Modern Railways having read that from 25 September Transport for London would be limiting 7 day Travelcard sales to its Oyster smart card. He was concerned that he would be unable to use his Zones 1-2 Travelcard for occasional cross-boundary journeys – in his case to and from Leighton Buzzard, where, as far as he knew, there were no Oyster card readers.
Time to consult Informed Sources and, since other readers could be affected and because it highlights the problems with smartcard policy raised in the August column, I thought it worth giving the issue some space.
For a holder of a Zones 1-2 Period Travelcard, paying the boundary excess for a one way journey between London and Leighton buzzard saves around £1. And this saving applies whether your travel card is a printed on card with a magnetic stripe or is in the memory of an Oyster card.
It is up to the Train Operating Company to be able to read your Oyster card, which is a valid travel card. What counts is the message, not the medium.
TfL saw this coming and ticket offices at 38 National Rail stations are equipped to handle Oyster, A further 100 have APTIS ticket issuing machines with the ANT modification which allows them to issue Oyster cards. A large number of hand-held Oystercard readers have also been issued to London TOCs which readers may have seen in use.
So, the message is that if you roll up at a station with an Oyster travel card you are entitled to pay the boundary excess. If your friendly local TOC (and I must try this one the team at Welwyn Garden City) wants proof of the validity of the Travelcard it is up to the managers to provide the ticket office staff with readers,
Note that this applies to Travelcards. Mr Jarrett also mentioned a poster he saw at Finchley Road and Frognal station saying that Oystercards were not valid at the station despite it being within Zone 2. This announcement referred only to the pre-pay facility provided by Oyster, which, incidentally, is being extended to small purchases, such as newspapers and light refreshments.
Indeed Mr Editor Abbott came across this facility with the Octopus pass on a recent visit to Hong Kong . Having bought a drink he tried to pay in cash, to the consternation of the shopkeeper who assumed he would use Octopus as a matter of course.
Why is Oyster pre-pay not valid where an Oyster Travelcard can be used? Well, at privatisation Travelcards were an existing joint product offered by BR and London Transport. As result they were perpetuated as a franchise condition, luckily, given later moves by ATOC to dispose of the Network Card.
When Oyster was introduced, what is now TfL paid for the equipment needed by TOCs to honour the Travelcards it issued in the new medium. Gates at some stations were upgraded with readers and hand-held readers provided for revenue protection staff.
In addition, there were some BR routes over which LU tickets other than Travelcards were valid. This historical hang over was also perpetuated as a franchise obligation.
When Pre Pay was introduced, Oystercard validity had to apply to these "interavailable" lines. Once again TfL provided the extra kit needed for Pre Pay check-in/out at stations, Euston to Harrow & Wealdstone being one route.
Now that Oyster is up and running, with 2.2 million users and one estimate valuing the reduction in fraud at £8 million, t he next step in Mayor Ken Livingstone's ambitions for London's transport is to have Pre Pay available throughout the Travelcard Zones. Just such a proposal was put to ATOC and DfT in December 2004.
Not much seems to be happening for two reasons. Obviously there is the cost of the hardware and expanding the Oyster system to provide a full validation service at all stations within the zonal boundary.
But more significant is the complexity inherent in the structure of the franchised passenger business and the associated financial and contractual issues. TOCs live and die by the franchise agreement and something like Oyster introduces the prospect of new costs, additional risks, radical changes to fares structure, revenues which weren't in the business plan and so on.
So, not surprisingly, stasis reigns even before you take into account the fact that Oyster, which works, highlights the lack of progress on DfT's preferred ITSO interoperable transport smartcard where, according to Informed Sources, the security software for the vital back-office systems is now unlikely to be available before October.
How different from the days when BR and LT agreed the original zonal Travelcard structure at a single meeting, including getting their respective boards and Government on side. Odd how the monolithic state-owned dinosaurs could make a bee-line from A to B while today we are reduced to trying to herd velociraptors.