please empty your brain below
What DG has shown is that for such a fantastically complex system to work, there had to be some complex logic involved.
So this is something which should not happen at all - but seems to be common enough to make special treatment reasonable.
dg writes: No charge is made.
I would nominate the Hong Kong Octopus system as better, and if memory serves me correctly it predates Oyster.
I can't figure out how they made it, each page is an image with no editable text. Theres no mention in the pdf of InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Xpress or Word.
I placed a photoshop pdf into word, saved it out as another pdf and I can still select the text. I think it was created on a mac though, as the base font in it is Helvetica.
Text in digital documents is often 'redacted' by setting the font style to a black highlight, or drawing a black box over content that needs to be redacted. If the PDF was exported as 'normal', it could be simply circumvented with many PDF readers or basic PDF editors.
Examples of failed PDF redaction may be commonly found via Google...
- if the gates have let you in, they will always let you out even in the old system. So if you touch in at Hammersmith with £1.50, you would never have got code 36 when trying to exit in zone 1, just a negative balance after.
- if you do get code 36 on exit (under either old or new system) because there wasn't a successful touch in, no maximum fare is applied. If staff open the gate and nothing else, it ends up as a free journey. Staff are meant to get the customer to pay a manual charge at the ticket machines if they try to exit and get a code 36.
I've rewritten much of the second half of the post, and I hope it's now correct (but it wouldn't surprise me if it still wasn't).
And this only goes to confirm how utterly complicated the fares system is...
Still, in six years time -- unless politics dictate otherwise -- you will have your Freedom Pass and not have to worry about this stuff!
I too think HK's Octopus card is better as it is more versatile eg you can buy things with it such as a meal in McDonalds.
Btw I don't agree on that it's easier yo pay in London than in for example Berlin with their super low-tech system. On arrival you just buy a travel card for a reasonable number of days, punch it at any validator before your first journey and then you only have to show it to the ticket inspectors that show up on the trains now and then. The only thing you really need to decide is if you are going out to the outskirts which technically are in Brandenburg rather than Berlin, and if so you need to choose a travel card with all three zones, otherwise just the two central zones. (Well, there is at travel card for only the two outer zones, but it's really unlikely that a visitor might want that). You don't have to keep track of that you've touched in and touched out in the correct order. There are no route validators to keep track of. There are no special Wimbledon-like situations. You just travel along as much as you like, at a fixed cost, and there is no risk of being overcharged.
BTW I wouldn't say that this is specific to London. We have had the same problems with overcharging due to system malfunctions in the Gothenburg area in Sweden (The contactless cards used by the public transit agency called "Västtrafik"). In some other cases like with the old paper ticket system previously used in Stockholm you were kind of overcharged as they seemingly random decided that older paper tickets weren't valid any more and you'd have to buy a new strip with 20 "coupons" (where two were used for the shortest trip for an adult).
YDU: I assume that you are from the Nethelands? If so, I agree that OV Chipkaart is really good. But at least five years ago there were some minor details that could be tricky for a visitor, like having to manually select the default for 1st/2nd class travel on trains, some refill things only accepting dutch cards (even though they call it "debit card" they don't accept for example Visa Electron which is a payment card with no credit) (this happened in the Hauge), and some refill things where some menus is missing in the english translation so buying some unusual lenght travel cards in Amsterdam had to be done with the menus in dutch (this happened in Amsterdam). If you arrived by some international train you'd have to find staff to manually let you out of the train station unless you found an open gate or it was ungated. Maybe a lot of this is resolved by now, but still.
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