Going to be 'interesting' at those stations with barriers but no ticket office, if you want to buy a ticket that the TVMs can't sell, or using a method of payment the TVMs won't accept.
Oyster can only be topped up in amounts of £5 or more, and Auto Top-Up is at least £20 a pop, whereas the daily charges on contactless could be as low as £1.50.
Key one I can think of is railcard discounts can be applied with Oyster
Yes, that's the only one I could think of and it isn't that big for 2 reasons: 1. the fares people usually pay on TfL aren't that big so the discount is minor and 2. The railcards need to be sorted out properly for the digital economy anyway, so it would be relatively straightforward to include a verification process between a TfL contactless account and a Railcard account for the discount. They should also do this to allow physical railcards to be linked to the digital app as well, but that's a different thread.
To the passenger or to TfL?
And Oyster activates the barriers more quickly than contactless, which is an equally important advantage
I imagine the future is having discounts loaded onto contactless and saving some money by getting rid of Oyster, but I hope they get rid of the 'lag' by then!
It's unlikely they'll ever be able to fully get rid of the lag - my understanding is that touching in/out with Oyster is a process that occurs entirely locally (with the card carrying the balance and travel history) whereas there is a degree of back-end communication that happens when you use contactless.And Oyster activates the barriers more quickly than contactless, which is an equally important advantage
There isn't any back end communication with contactless, but the gates/validators store a deny list, which I can imagine is now quite large
No it can't. 5p is the minimum at National Rail ticket machines. Just select 'other amount' and key in the amount required.
I think the delay is more to do with handshaking with the contactless card.
No, that is the big issue.
There must be a way out of this. If we can assume that a bank card is more 'personal' than an Oyster, which even looks like it can be handed around at will (and sometimes can be), shouldn't it be enough for whatever discount entitlement to be proved once at the point it is associated with the payment card, and then left to run until expiry - or cancelled if necessary? That proof can be more involved - checking names, addresses, etc. - than anything that would happen during a ticket check. Edit: I suppose the concern is double-discounting. The bank card discount can be proved, but the Railcard might be elsewhere. Why RDG always want Railcard numbers on tickets I suppose. With eTickets, this should be possible.
There's plenty of people that are happy to misuse a Freedom Pass etc. so I can understand the reluctance of TfL/TOCs to simply allow people to apply a discount that can't be checked (though checks are rare as hen's teeth, at least on the Tube).
I may be over-simplifying things, but I think it's down to cost. The current devices operate with a simple whitelist/blacklist capability. During the trial period your card had to be on the whitelist to work. Once the system went live you just mustn't be on the blacklist. I'd imagine that this functionality is not bespoke to TfL. Adding the ability to store a third list might be prohibitively expensive, especially if TfL are the first to want such a thing.
That's true, but in the grand scheme of things you'd have thought TfL could save far more by ditching Oyster, than it would cost to develop a contactless discount checking system.
Pre pandemic revenue checks were not as rare as you might imagined. They would stand at the gateline and would check for double gaters or for a gateline that flashed orange (which indicated a discount) If you had a normal oyster card you probably wouldn't notice them
I must look out for the orange flash next time.
I would get checked on the London underground about four times a year not a huge amount but probably enough to catch if I was misusing the pass on a regular basis.
Mine is registered so it can be tracked but I like it because it only represents a few pounds in value. I can carry it in an accessible pocket to save time at the barriers in the knowledge that I will never lose more than what I have put on the card. My banks cards, which could be used for several £45 contactless transactions befoere I even knew they were gone, are carried in a secure inside pocket.
Most foreign-issued contactless cards will be accepted by the TfL system, but there are some exceptions that will be rejected when touch-in is attempted. I'd suggest that actually using it with a foreign card could be unwise though, as you'd incur currency conversion losses and the card issuer could charge a foreign transaction fee on each payment.
Some still like to do the percentage-with-a-fixed-minimum thing - and remember the question is about people with foreign cards coming to London, so they're playing on terms set by banks in their home country.
