“Gate line barriers are now a norm at all but the most rural stations in the UK, and this is the situation in many other developed countries. Experience showed that open-access stations led to a rapid increase in fraudulent travel, with on-train ticket checks only recovering a small percentage of the lost revenue, and thus gate free stations are not an option in the foreseeable future.
“The regular commuter with an electronically encoded ticket or a smart bank card knows precisely how to get through a barrier line, but the occasional traveller is often bemused by what has to be done and a sense of impatience quickly arises if one is held up by a ‘ditherer’ who searches in wallet or pockets for the correct card or piece of paper.
“At main line stations, where travellers often have printed-off paper tickets as part of an advance fare promotion, the gates do not always recognise the bar code being scanned, with inevitable delay to other passengers as queues quickly form. The advent of paperless tickets further complicates the problem if an authority on a smart phone is proffered up with a fair chance of this not being recognised.
“So what can be done to sort out this potentially growing situation? The RSSB has initiated a project with industry to try and find a solution that will help regular travellers in the short term and the general travelling public as a longer-term objective…”
What a palaver of trying to botch together a multitude of conflicting suboptimal technologies just to avoid having a sensible system of compatible ticketing products that are properly managed. Some sensible information and issuing compatible tickets would deal with the issues of irregular travellers perhaps not being familiar with a ticket gate. Also not issuing reams of bar coded toilet paper instead of a magnetically encoded ticket would stop misread problems with bar coded tickets.
A half arsed solution in search of a problem.
@WW
LR does not vouch for the accuracy or quality of the industry links provided. That determination is left as an exercise for the reader 🙂
When regular travellers are really quite adept at placing their cards over Oyster readers without visibly slackening their pace through a barrier, it begs the question of why any one of these would want their smartphone to be read as an even cleverer way of achieving the same throughput. It’s possible to imagine that laughable errors might happen, akin to the risk of ‘card clash’ that TfL spent so much effort warning us all against.
Irregular travellers would be even more averse to clever technology that might read the wrong signal from somewhere about their person. So it might be prudent to abandon altogether that slightly pointless additional leap forward. Going back a bit technologically, print at home barcode stuff is all very fine and useful but it’s probably best to activate readers on just a few of the gates in a multiple gateline (and clearly label those gates!) so that the regulars can stick to their autopilot method of travel, and avoid the danger of being behind the dithering and mystified as they fight their little individual battles with the gates.
I guess NR are responsible for maintaining the gateline ticket readers. They should then make more effort to maintain them. Cannon Street is a hotch potch of lanes where either the magnetic card ticket readers don’t work, or the Oyster readers don’t. And as a commuter you just have to guess which one will suit the ticket type you are using …
I recently used my Freedom Pass (ie Oyster) as an ITSO card on a bus outside London. Instead of touch and go I had to reach in, lay it on a pad, and wait 4-5 seconds until the driver told me it had registered. Utterly impractical for mass passengers, imho! Any ticket inspection needs to be _fast_ and, yes, simple to understand.
Alison, such is the joy of the DfT specified ITSO! Impractical for large flows, but it is what we are stuck with.
The Southern Key Cards are noticeable slower to open the gates. Rather than touch and step it’s more touch stop step. I have almost hit the gates more than once on a Monday after using oyster at the weekend.
AlisonW. Stagecoach South have recently put new (replacement) card readers onto their bus ticket machines. I understand they are due to go live for contactless card payments in the near future. They seem to be slightly faster than the original card readers. However, out here where things are slower, a lot of the older passengers drop their cards onto the readers, then pick them up again after the bleep. Life is just that bit slower here!