Last week Future
Cities Catapult organised a talk by Matthew
Hudson from TfL entitled The Story of Oyster: How TfL Revolutionised Urban Fare
Collection.
I
missed the first few minutes, but it was still a fascinating run through Oyster
/ Contactless ... not least a reminder that the original impetus to develop
Oyster was the queues that used to build up at the ticket barriers, as the use
of paper tickets (Magstripe) was incredibly slow compared to Oyster and even
Contactless !
One
option was to build lots more ticket barriers - but thankfully TfL developed
Oyster.
Below
are some random nuggets from the talk together with some of my views ...
A maximum of 15 passengers per minute can
get through ticket barriers using the old Magstripe tickets
A busy commuter station like Liverpool
Street (as opposed to a station with lots of tourists) can get over
25 passengers per minute through each barrier using Oyster
Contactless is a bit slower (it has to run
more check processes before deciding to open the gate) but it is getting
quicker with new Contactless chips, and also TfL are trying to reduce the
number of check processes to speed it up.
5.5m people regularly use Oyster Pay as
You Go (PAYG)
This represents 86% of users - although
some/many also have a Travelcard
58% of fares come from PAYG
The TfL board have decided PAYG should be
the primary product in future
The original incentive for season tickets
(which was the cost of issue and congestion at the ticket office) is gone
It sounds like in future the PAYG and
Travelcard fares will be equalised
Matthew talked about the original
requirement for tickets being to stop the bus conductors from pocketing the
fares - it wasn't to control passengers.
Oyster customer level data is kept for 2
months - to help resolve customer issues
This compares with Paris where customer
data has to be binned at the end of every day
The original Oyster configuration where if
you failed to "touch out" you were charged the minimum fare resulted
in 15% fare evasion
No mention of what fare evasion level is
on Boris buses !
Serious Oyster analysis started in the
lead up to London 2012
There was up to a 7% decrease in passenger
volumes following widespread warnings about congestion - some stations felt
empty !
There are many requests from different
parts of TfL for Oyster analysis - most of which get denied as they won't
actually lead to better decision making.
TfL have licenced the intellectual
property behind Oyster/Contactless to the company Cubic for 15m gbp - TfL themselves will not
be directly installing Oyster around the world.
Matthew said that in future TfL will make
Oyster "more like Contactless"
There will be a weekly cap on Oyster in
the future - and refunds will be pushed out to all Oyster readers (including
buses) ready for collection the next time the Oyster card is tapped.
Sounds to me that I will be able to stop
using my Contactless once weekly Oyster capping arrives !
