I've started this thread in response to the posts in this thread ...
https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ow-ticketing-rules.174893/page-2#post-3803853
... as they raise wider issues.
At present, as we all know, gate-line barriers are a bit of a lottery : invalid tickets are sometimes accepted and valid tickets often rejected. The technological limitations (and in some cases technical errors or management failings) that lie behind this are well documented elsewhere.
As it is, a gate-line fail provides for a potentially useful top-level triage but is far from definitive and staff are generally well aware of this.
Having to refer to staff is a pain - in that sense, a more accurate system would be welcome.
However, one possible downside of a barrier achieving say 98% accuracy is that gate line staff will much more likely to treat a gate-line rejection as definitive and not investigate further.
The second problem is that we don't know how valid locations for a given ticket will be determined.
The public is provided with the routeing guide; unfortunately, that is riddled with ambiguities and inconsistencies.
On-line booking engines use a set of electronic data and separate routeing guide rules that in some cases differ materially from any reasonable interpretation of the public-facing routeing guide and which are themselves open to various interpretations (see the different behaviours of different booking engines in edge cases).
The rail industry allows the public access to the routeing data specification but chooses to keep the routeing guide data itself (and the internal rules for interpreting it) a commercial secret so the public have no way of telling whether a barrier location has been correctly denied to them or not.
https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ow-ticketing-rules.174893/page-2#post-3803853
... as they raise wider issues.
At present, as we all know, gate-line barriers are a bit of a lottery : invalid tickets are sometimes accepted and valid tickets often rejected. The technological limitations (and in some cases technical errors or management failings) that lie behind this are well documented elsewhere.
As it is, a gate-line fail provides for a potentially useful top-level triage but is far from definitive and staff are generally well aware of this.
Having to refer to staff is a pain - in that sense, a more accurate system would be welcome.
However, one possible downside of a barrier achieving say 98% accuracy is that gate line staff will much more likely to treat a gate-line rejection as definitive and not investigate further.
The second problem is that we don't know how valid locations for a given ticket will be determined.
The public is provided with the routeing guide; unfortunately, that is riddled with ambiguities and inconsistencies.
On-line booking engines use a set of electronic data and separate routeing guide rules that in some cases differ materially from any reasonable interpretation of the public-facing routeing guide and which are themselves open to various interpretations (see the different behaviours of different booking engines in edge cases).
The rail industry allows the public access to the routeing data specification but chooses to keep the routeing guide data itself (and the internal rules for interpreting it) a commercial secret so the public have no way of telling whether a barrier location has been correctly denied to them or not.