Quote:
Originally Posted by markbarbera
Question to Oyster users: Would a card like Oyster (and presumably Presto) be used for monthly passes as well - i.e. can you pay for unlimited travel for the month/year using an Oyster Card, or is it strictly a per-use fare card?
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You could have weekly, monthly (and I think annual) travelcards set up on your oystercard -although there was a small implementation glitch, in that some suburban train station readers couldn't handle the single-trip and one-day travelcard transactions at first - so only people with weekly passes or above could use Oyster.
The other really neat thing with Oyster is that as you make trips during the day, it maxes out your daily payment in line with the appropriate travelcard that you could have bought for your trip.
In London, you can get different zone travelcards, depending on where you need to travel - previously, if you only bought, say, a zone 1-2 and then had to travel to zone 4 - or, say, a zone 2-6 and then go in to central London which is Zone 1 - you'd be SOL. Not any more!
I think they were also looking towards rolling out the card beyond public transport for micropayments and suchlike. Omro might know more than me, as he left London after I did. I think one bank (Barclays?) was trialling a combined debit card and Oystercard, too.
But if they implemented Presto so that I could just use one card for HSR/GO/TTC/etc, it could make it so much easier to modify pricing strategies and provide greater incentives to increase public transport usage... and potentially integrate with other payment systems.