Bag of cocks. Simplify the ticketing system by: a) make all the tickets generally cheaper, so you don’t need to make special advance super saver restricted use tickets b) actually tell us when peak time is, and keep it consistent c) no more “you can only use it on this train company” tickets d) no more “you can only use it on this exact train” tickets. If you cancel my train, I’m getting on the next train that goes there and you’re accepting my ticket. e) there are three main tickets - single, day return, period return f) you can buy discounted tickets for a week, month, year of the same journey g) you can buy a ticket online, from a website to email, from an app, in a ticket office with a person or from a machine
Basically, just get rid of the stupid shit with all the “special” conditions on it.
Zombie@feddit.uk 1 day ago
So by making it reliant upon a foreign satellite navigation system, everyone having a working phone, and a willingness to give us permission to track all of your movements, we’ve now made it simpler than a piece of paper!
i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
It does seem like a very over-engineered solution, with far too many points of failure.
Unquote0270@programming.dev 22 hours ago
Hendy is a fucking joke, look at the saga he’s conducting in Oxford. This idea is also a joke, I wouldn’t believe it’s serious if I had seen all the other completely messed up stuff happening in the UK.
freebee@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
I’m not saying it’s better from a privacy point of view. It’s clearly not. And it is more complicated behind the scenes to track 3.000.000 people than to print little pieces of paper. But, they aren’t lying when saying it is indeed less complicated to the end user, Instead of figuring out ticketing systems and pricing scales from various companies, regions, with different regulations about exceptions on prices or how many people are a “group”, etc to find the ticket / price that is the best deal for you, you just “activate” when getting on a vehicle and “deactivate” when done traveling. I’ve used it, it’s called Fairtiq here and it really is waaaay less complicated to use for average end user than any other ticketing system like counters, machines, websites. They track you, the data is hopefully also used for optimising public transport towards measured demand, and in return for tracking they promise you’ll always get the best possible price for whatever route you travelled. It’s not the worst way to use tracking technologies.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
In D.C. (one of the few places in the US with good public transport) you can get a pass you put money on. Then you just scan it when you enter/exit a station and you get billed for the price of that trip. It’s dead simple. (It could be made even simpler if you just connected a credit card to it though, or if it just was, as an option, your credit card or google/apple pay.)
It sounds like to fix this problem the government just needs to regulate these companies and implement a similar system. It’s far simpler and more reliable and robust.
Zombie@feddit.uk 18 hours ago
Aye, so to compensate for a complicated, privatised, and fractured rail system, they implement a complicated ticketing system in the name of convenience. It’s a shit system to cover for all the other shit systems within English rail.
If they instead nationalise the rail, the end user can have simple fares from one easy provider.
www.scotrail.co.uk/…/peak-fares-gone-for-good