Indeed. The world is moving on and people increasingly purchase train tickets through apps as they find it more convenient. That’s not a dig at ticket office staff, it’s the way it is.
It’s similar to newspapers, the bottom is completely falling out of the market as people choose to get their news in a different way to 10 or 20 years ago.
Very true. My org is paperless and while you still need a good electronic filing system it's much easier for me to have everything that I need on my laptop or, if I forget it, on the cloud so I can use another work computer if necessary.
I actually made a point of thanking the team responsible for it because as autistic a large variety of paperwork can get overwhelming and thus for sensory processing, e-everything makes a difference to me, including not creating a fire hazard at home with a lot of paper detritus as well. (Third-party laptop chargers are safer than they were, as are electric blankets, and as I used to be a bit paranoid about fire, I take a lot of precautions at home not to let it happen. My late husband banned open flames and candles and when I was left on my own, I took out pretty good home insurance to make sure my autism didn't accidentally do anything that could leave me in trouble if something terrible were to happen.)
Elderly who aren't tech savvy as they predate it are literally dying off. It won't be long before almost every elderly person uses tech. Ten years maybe?
Twenty years and Gen X will be starting to count as elderly. Gen X is almost completely tech savvy.
Yeah, my parents are boomers and in their 70s and are confident users of smartphones. My mum is glued to hers, my dad is less connected but still incredibly computer literate (he taught me to program our BBC micro when I was 5 and had a PC by the time I was 10) and my sister and I are the generation that grew up with video games as a standard form of entertainment. I tried to write my own but I was a bit young to be one of the 'bedroom programmer' generation and too autistic to plan out coding projects in my mind. I'm good at facts and figures but struggle with the cognitive capacity to visualise individual objects as a single system.
Most of my friends are Gen X (I'm just below the cut-off point but not quite a millennial, although I'd identify more with millennials) and they're mostly programmers -- although I met them through a sci-fi club, so that would skew things a lot too.
I don't believe that you speak for the way that most of us use eTickets or smart phones.
Yeah, agreed. A lot of these kind of enthusiast forums attract a lot of switched on people, but we're generally exceptions to the rule. I do try to switch off my enthusiast brain when doing anything for any forum that requires analysing audience behaviour, and that's actually been a lot more helpful in showing me where either the issues lie or what to do to target the actual audience out there.
Having been a commuter for ten years and still actively using the railways for work trips, I'm fairly confident in saying that you can prise e-tickets from my cold dead hands and I highly suspect their share of the market will eclipse paper if it hasn't already done so. It's ultimately just a means to an end for most people, so although I doubt paper will completely end up obsolete, it will probably end up being integrated into the e-system by way of TVMs and ticket offices just printing Aztec code tickets. (Basingstoke office already does that and has done for a matter of several years, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for, say, the next generation of TVMs not to do likewise.)
