Public Transport in your particular part of the region

[thegeek]

Still it's nice they found a home for that Morrisons logo from a couple of years ago

Margaret Calvert OBE would like a word.

[Pete]

Current estimates are it'll take at least two weeks to fix (as in, shove some supports under) the motorway prior to its eventual complete demolition. Full metro services may not return until February.

Impressively, they managed to shore up the flyover enough that services through the tunnel were able to restart on NYE. And apparently a second of the new trains snuck into passenger service on the sly that afternoon.

[thegeek]

So a new thing in Scotland is ScotRail's tap & go app.

I saw it advertised on Facebook saying it "couldn't be easier" - and I think I would like to disagree with that.

For a start it's not integrated into the existing ScotRail app, and also requires its own account, and you need to manually enter payment details (rather than, say, linking with Google Pay).

Once you've got yourself set up, you open the app, tell it you want to start a journey, and confirm what station you're at. It gives you a 2D barcode to get yourself through ticket gates (if there are any) or to show a ticket inspector. Then once you've reached your destination and scanned yourself out, tell it you're done, and it charges you the cheapest fare for the journey. I was surprised to discover this can include a super off-peak return, even when I'd only made a single journey.

So yeah, it's kinda nifty. But. This is not how you simplify things. Make the fares easier to understand in the first place. Let people tap in and out with their bank card - or if they don't want to do that, with a stored value on an ITSO smartcard.

It never fails to amaze me how people can look at the success of Oyster and contactless in London and then come up with something quite so customer-unfriendly in response.

[BBC TV Centre]

So yeah, it's kinda nifty. But. This is not how you simplify things. Make the fares easier to understand in the first place. Let people tap in and out with their bank card - or if they don't want to do that, with a stored value on an ITSO smartcard.

It never fails to amaze me how people can look at the success of Oyster and contactless in London and then come up with something quite so customer-unfriendly in response.

I loathe this obsession with apps for everything, and it all the crap that comes with it - you know, choose a password with min 12 characters, number, letter, uppercase, lowercase, hierglyphic, then followed by reset questions like tell us your favourite colour, mothers maiden name, place you were born etc.
You are very much right in the TFL approach - use something pretty everyone has (a bank card), let the system do the hard miles.

[gottago]

It never fails to amaze me how people can look at the success of Oyster and contactless in London and then come up with something quite so customer-unfriendly in response.

22 years Oyster has been available for now and still most of the country lags behind on even contactless. I was surprised when I was in Glasgow this weekend that contactless wasn't available on such a small self contained network and I ended up queuing for a paper ticket.

Merseyrail is the worst for this, I believe they do now have a working smart card but their botched attempts at introducing the old Walrus card were pretty embarrassing. Even now they still don't accept QR tickets and a few stations still only have a ticket office and no machine which just seems crazy in 2025.

[Charlie Wells]

So yeah, it's kinda nifty. But. This is not how you simplify things. Make the fares easier to understand in the first place. Let people tap in and out with their bank card - or if they don't want to do that, with a stored value on an ITSO smartcard.

It never fails to amaze me how people can look at the success of Oyster and contactless in London and then come up with something quite so customer-unfriendly in response.

I loathe this obsession with apps for everything, and it all the crap that comes with it - you know, choose a password with min 12 characters, number, letter, uppercase, lowercase, hierglyphic, then followed by reset questions like tell us your favourite colour, mothers maiden name, place you were born etc.
You are very much right in the TFL approach - use something pretty everyone has (a bank card), let the system do the hard miles.

With regards to Oyster, one disadvantage is the technology only supports 16 different fare zones, all of which are currently in use/allocated. This is why newer 'tap in' expansions have been contactless only, and Oyster is not supported. Currently the disadvantage with contactless is that railcards cannot be added, unlike Oyster which supports at least some railcards.

From what I've quickly read, it looks like ScotRail's 'tap & go' app allows for railcards to be linked to a user's account. (I've no idea if Two Together railcards are supported, though it might be an idea of them to allow user accounts to be linked to fully support this.) It looks like this is officially a trial, so maybe in time they'll merge it into their main app.

Maybe longer term this app could be expanded, so that like the Oyster app you could add you payment cards to it. That way you could then tap in & out using your contactless card/device and the payment would be worked out via the Tap & Pay.

[thegeek]

You can add railcards - but not Two Together or Family & Friends - or a 16-18 Young Scot card.

Adding discounts to contactless payment cards isn't an insurmountable problem - they do it in the Netherlands on OVpay: https://www.ovpay.nl/en/age-based-disco ... less-cards

When you add the discount, you also need to add a photo of the person, which I guess acts as some sort of check against abuse should a ticket inspector come along. (And I've seen a lot more ticket inspectors on trains in Scotland than on trains in the Netherlands)

[Blewatter]

Wigan North Western is getting Ticket barriers, set to be online from the 31st of March. Personally, I'd have spent money refurbishing the station