Comment on Parents face extra bus fees over smartphone stance
rmuk@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
TrentBarton are a fucking nightmare for this.
They used to have a physical Mango card with RFID that could be topped up manually in stores or online, or be set to auto top-up. But they killed that off and replaced it with an app that displays a QR code - an app that has to be online to work, and a QR code that changes every fifteen seconds or so. Seeing elderly people trying to deal with that was horrible for everyone involved, not least the elderly person themselves.
They also have the most bewildering convention for labelling their services. Instead of numbers, they all have quirky names like “the threes” (there is no “the ones/twos”, but there is a “the nines”), “rainbow one” (there is no “rainbow two”), “H1” (there is no “H2”), “my15” (there is no “my1” through “my14”), “the harlequin”, “the mainline”, “the miller”, “the comet”, “red arrow”, etc, but those all refer to multiple bus services that visit different places or take different routes so you just have to know that the bus that’s pulling up is the one you want which you can only see in - you guessed it - the fucking app.
I honestly think that the higher-ups at TrentBarton are sadists who get off on making their services as infuriating and confounding as possible.