Well, everyone in London would have encountered the Oyster card. It’s a pre-pay card onto which you can load pre-pay credit, from which the appropriate charge will be deducted every time you make a journey, or you can load a weekly or monthly pass onto it, which you can use to make as many journeys as you need to, for the zones that you bought it for. The card can have both the pass and credit loaded onto it, so that if you make a journey outside of the zones covered by your pass, it will automatically charge the appropriate amount for the journey outside of the zone. This all sounds like a great idea, but there are several things you should be aware of.

First of all, I was surprised to note that the oyster card was introduced without seeming to cause any ripple at all among privacy advocates (or not one that was vocal enough to be heard). EVERY single journey that you make using your oyster card is logged and saved by Transport for London. They have actually said that they will have no problem sharing this information with any law-enforcement agencies. Which brings up the question: “Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custudios” — “Who watches the watchers”? Any London-underground ticket person can call up a history of your past 10 journeys. (This is also available to you from the double-width Oyster-recharge machine as well). They don’t need you to do anything except give them the card. Actually, with a scanner slightly more powerful than the current Oyster-card readers, someone walking past you can read this information off your card!

The other point of my writing this was to express my frustration at the lack of functionality of what one would expect such a system to have. Initially, you could only purchase student-discounted travelcards for your Oystercard only from a counter. After a few months, it did become possible to renew your pass from the standard Oyster-recharge terminals. But, you still cannot recharge a student travelcard online. And also not via phone. And standard non-discounted travelcard users can only recharge via phone 24-hours in advance, and need to collect the recharge from a Tube station counter. So if you happen to use the DLR for the first stretch of your journey, as I do, then you run into some problems.

Well, plenty of room for improvement still there.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2005 at 15:20 and is filed under London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.