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Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

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Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#221

Post by sidewndr46 »

dmurray wrote: post #91
Symbiote wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a discussion on a different post pointing out that maintenance of a highway is still very costly. Charging only the users, rather than all taxpayers, appears very fair.

Charging by road use definitely seems fair, but it's a problem when you have 50 major roads in the state and by historical accident only say 2 of them get tolled. North-South travellers end up subsidising East-West travellers or vice versa. It's hard to come up with a perfectly fair system. Tolling every road is expensive and tax on fuel has its own trade offs.

The irony of this discussion is we're talking about Florida. A place where absolutely no one really should be living in the first place. The eastern seaboard is just a bunch of infilled swamp, which was more valuable as swamp.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#222

Post by sidewndr46 »

johnwalkr wrote: post #181
reustle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in the US and currently live in Japan. We pay around $95 to go about 5 hours on a highway from Tokyo to Kyoto, for example. 3~ hours north is about $35. I think this more accurately charges us drivers for the resources we consume.

I was also going to mention Japan. All highways are tolled and Japan also has virtually zero street parking, and free parking is mostly limited to private lots owned by stores. Of course, the more rural a place you go, the less this generalization is true. Even if you already own a car, it is in general more expensive, inconvenient and maybe even slower to choose to drive to work. As a general rule of thumb, driving…

From an outsider's perspective this actually appears to be a happy medium. You can do most normal things without the need for a vehicle or the costs incurred. But if in your free time you want to take some trip to the middle of nowhere the possibility of that still exists.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#223

Post by tazjin »

Symbiote wrote: post #215
tazjin wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moscow metro does this. In very busy stations only the turnstiles at the sides have this functionality though, as the native NFC cards ("Тройка") are much faster (contactless payments can take O(seconds), which is a lot when there's 50k people trying to get through).

London managed to make the contactless payment almost as fast as the native (Oyster Card) payment. It is perceivably slower, I'd estimate 0.8 seconds vs 0.5 seconds or something like that. Close enough that one person trying to use the wrong turnstile would remove any benefit from separating them. Anyway, 60% of passengers use it now.

I remember contactless being okay in London when I lived there, but I'd always switch queues immediately if someone pulled out a phone to pay. Those people frequently need a good five seconds to pay ...

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#224

Post by boosteri »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #177
lxgr wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is to just tax fuel, which has the nice side effect of being roughly proportionate to actual road usage and pollution.

That would have been better in the past, but doesn't work so well with electric vehicles. Ideally, vehicles should be charged in relation to approximately the fourth power of their weight as that is proportional to the road damage. However, that will drastically change the economics of logistics companies.

Not necessarily, but governments would need to be transparent about subsidising logistics.. instead of the current state where this is done covertly by taxing little vehicles disproportionately.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#225

Post by switch007 »

lozenge wrote: post #133
switch007 wrote: post #6

> Nowadays, the industry would very much like you to ditch your paper ticket in favour of a fancy mobile barcode one (or an ITSO smartcard2); not only do they not have to spend money on printing tickets but they also gain the ability to more precisely track the ticket’s usage across the network and minimise fraud. And unsurprisingly only a subset of tickets are available on the apps. Therefore the government gets its…

Well, currently the single fare is often £0.20 less than the return fare, for historical reasons. Scrapping them seems like a good solution. As already shown in this thread, even the employees don't understand the very complicated fare rules. My manager was very proud of winning a half hour long argument with a ticket inspector about the Conditions of Carriage, but most of us just want to buy a ticket and go.

Public transport exists to serve the public. If complicated return fares, while inefficient and perhaps annoying, ultimately better serve the public, then that is good reason for them to remain.

I know what will happen. We're at the stage of the PR spiel where they acknowledge there will be some losers but overall it "will benefit the majority". That will silence any critics. Then when it's being implemented, it'll turn to "we always knew there would be some winners and losers (dropping the "it will benefit the majority" part). Then a couple of years after the change, it will be: we regret how much it's affected a lot of people, but it's here now, and we're using all the extra revenue to invest in the railway. Like something out of Yes, Minister

Given the list of issues with our rail system currently, I'm not sure abolishing return fares should be high up on the list.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#226

Post by iggldiggl »

tialaramex wrote: post #135
harvey9 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And they still honour the daily fare cap with this payment method, and you can register your card and access an online fare statement.

And the weekly cap. Unless you are staying for a while (e.g. working here for a month, overseas leg of a degree with-a-year-abroad) you can just tap into all of London's transport with your payment card and it's simpler without costing extra.

Although the weekly cap is always a fixed Monday to Sunday period, so if your arrival/departure dates don't match up with that, you can end up paying an additional capping period as compared to a dedicated travelcard (which can start on any day of the week).

The daily or weekly pay-as-you-go capping also can't be combined with rail tickets beyond the TfL/Oyster zones (whereas a travelcard can, even if it's on Oyster), and if you're a transit nerd, the maximum journey times allowed with pay-as-you-go can occasionally be annoying.

Having said that, I do concede that contactless payment is pretty neat, and I did make use of it, too, if I was staying less than a week in London, but all in all I'd still be a bit unhappy if e.g. the weekly travelcards were simply discontinued.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#227

Post by usr1106 »

nly wrote: post #125

The fact that there's a gender field on the ticket is interesting.

It might be needed for night trains (sleepers). Before COVID-19 in Finland you could reserve a single bed for women or men, which meant your share the compartment with a stranger of the same sex.

A model which of course assumed sex is strictly binary and having strangers of opposite sex in the same compartment is problematic, while having strangers of the same sex is unproblematic.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#228

Post by riialist »

usr1106 wrote: post #227
nly wrote: post #125

The fact that there's a gender field on the ticket is interesting.

It might be needed for night trains (sleepers). Before COVID-19 in Finland you could reserve a single bed for women or men, which meant your share the compartment with a stranger of the same sex. A model which of course assumed sex is strictly binary and having strangers of opposite sex in the same compartment is problematic, while having strangers of the same sex is unproblematic.

Same-gender compartments in trains or whatever simultaneously make sense and do not. E.g. for "cis-gender hetero woman" - as myself - these policies give me privileges such as more clean toilets but longer queues - except in tech events, where women are nowadays a minority.

In Mumbai the local trains have separate wagons for women, which was nice. There was space, women who talked to me as as "sister" singing and making handicrafts. The other sections of the train were packed as sardines in a can, and men groping each other, in particular those with fair complexion. And please don't take this comment as xenophobic or as an insult against Indian people or culture in Mumbai, this is just how it is.

At the same time, the only time I have been actually hurt by sexual harassment by a stranger happened here in Finland when a girl high on something groped me in a techno party and tried to kiss me. I got amused first, but after a while I tried to detach her. No one come to help me even I yelled that please get this girl away from me. If it had been a guy, I would have kicked him to ground, but for a girl - I could not do anything apart from just trying to push her away. Eventually we both fell down stairs and my ankle got sprained.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#229

Post by LtWorf »

Symbiote wrote: post #218
LtWorf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come here in Sweden. The main station of the 2nd biggest city has TWO ticket machines. The minor stations have none. You're expected to use the phone.

I wondered on a recent trip where I was supposed to add credit to a Västtrafik card I had from a previous trip. In Denmark, there are equivalent top-up machines at almost every rail and metro station. (The exceptions are some very rural lines, where machines are on trains instead.) At the central station in Copenhagen there must be at least 10 machines, if not more. There are also two SJ ticket machines! Sorry Gothen…

You must go to pressbyrån, but many people use their app to buy the ticket. This of course means that you can get fined if your phone runs out of charge.

The trams have a machine selling tickets on board, and that costs sensibly more than the other options. There is no way to buy tickets on a bus. On a train you must plea your case to the conductor as to why you have no ticket. For example like explaining that the pressbyrån closed at 15.00 and the closest open one implied an 8km walk.

Re: Reversing UK mobile rail tickets

#230

Post by LtWorf »

rejectfinite wrote: post #137
LtWorf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In sweden Coop supermarkets were closed for a weekend because they rely on some cloud thingy from USA that had gotten a ransomware. It was their billing system, you couldn't pay cash, they had no way to record it.

You are halfway there. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/coop-supermar... This issue was that Visma (the MSP COOP uses for the Teller systems) had their Kaseya VSA server open to the internet and thus got affected by this. An RMM itself is fine, needed to manage systems. Do you know how many Swedish companies is on Office 365 + some RMM? A lot. lmao We also have our own shit break all the time like Swish…

Oh visma! My job uses that for our salaries. I feel better now! :'(

I don't have swish. I have trust issues. Most people in sweden are very prone to give trust it seems.

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