please empty your brain below

Card Clash!

https://twitter.com/stnmasterapp/status/511758942486401024/photo/1
Even if you wanted one, phoning your bank may not work. I got a new card recently (replacement for an expired card) and it was firmly contactless free. Not everyone is issuing them yet.
I'm with you on this. I don't want my bank account cluttered up with loads of tiny transactions. I'm quite happy with oyster on auto top up (I don't travel regularly enough to need a season).

It might suit the very occasional traveler though, such as someone who lives far from London (I think there are a few of theses people somewhere).
Not wanting a card which, if stolen, could be used with any security checks whatsoever, I asked my bank to replace the contactless card they had issued without me asking for it. It took several goes for them to achieve that - and when it eventually expired, they sent me another contactless one!
On the TfL website, it is said that if you have a weekly travelcard, and you use it outside Zone 1, you should keep using it instead of a contactless bank card.

Any idea why?
re: card clash. I keep my oyster card separate from my wallet (usually in trouser pocket).

I was waiting to get off the 390 bus (New Bus for London) the other day by the middle doors and the card reader positioned by the door tried to read my debit card. My wallet was in my jacket inside pocket at just the right height for the reader. Luckily the 'contact' was too brief or distant and the reader beeped and let me know that it had not been able to read the card!
Just heard an audio clip of the Mayor saying, last week at the GLA, that contactless bank cards would over time supersede Oyster.
In which case, what about all the concessionary travel cards (Freedom Pass, and so on)? Gone too? - I know it's a live 'austerity' topic.
Or could a contactless bank card (which I don't want to have) be coded to act as a Freedom Pass?
The other day I had a new oyster wallet forced into my hands by a contactless spokesperson and it got me wondering why anyone who lives in London, or at least uses tfl services frequently, would use one?

I just keep mine in the front card slot (pouch?) in my wallet that I can slip out of the wallet while its still in my pockets (a finely tuned operation no doubt) and use naked on the scanner.

Don't you ever find yourself forgetting your oyster wallet?
I won't be using my contactless card because it seems to have stopped working (or didn't work the last couple of times I tried it). I'm not going to risk walking up to the gates, finding the card doesn't work and getting loads of death-ray stares as I try to find my Oyster...
I also have an annual Travelcard as this means my weekend travel is basically free. But I didn't have to pay £1100 for it myself, my employer lent me the money and then takes the loan payments directly from my payslip each month over 10 months. If your employer offers this scheme it is easily the best way to budget for travel.
DG - If you purchase your annual ticket from a NR station (Liverpool Street is a good bet - staff there are trained on this), you can have it as an Oyster but with the annual Gold card benefits on trains in the south east.
My work pattern doesn't justify an annual ticket now, but when it did I always appreciated the Gold Card savings.
IslandDweller,

Take your Gold Card to any tube ticket office and they can add the discounted out-of-zone benefit to your Oyster Card. Doesn't have to be a NR office, tube ones can do it but occasionally staff don't know how to.
Chris - personaly, I have forgotten my wallet going to work far more times this year (at least four times) than I have my Oyster (not forgotten for several years)!

Gordon - you actually believe anything our Mayor says? Unless TfL have plans to enforce a contactless card and somehow tie in all Freedom Passes etal to them, Oyster - or some successor - is going to be here for some time. The London Assembly's already had several swipes at the Mayor on this one. There's thousands of people who don't have bank accounts after all.
Oyster will be kept but it seems that the plan is that at some point it will begin to operate like a contactless card in that it will be passive not active - that is not showing your spend at the barriers but updating overnight.
Just waiting for somebody to invent a Faraday cage for wallets such that only one card is readable at a time through the wallet. If only I were clever.....
@Jon
"Take your Gold Card to any tube ticket office and they can add the discounted out-of-zone benefit to your Oyster Card. Doesn't have to be a NR office"
Indeed there are still some NR ticket offices, even within the GLA area, that won't have anything to do with Oyster (despite having LU trains servinbg them, this included Richmond and Wimbledon until quite recently.)
"I have an advantage, being male, in that I actually have pockets"

One reason I took to dressmaking!

That and price, and fit, and individuality, and . . .
@Running Corespondent

There is such thing already (basically shielding the rest), but there can be a niche indeed for something smarter.

http://www.fonerize.com/en-gb/nfc-shields-fonezafe-shield-to-prevent-your-contactless-payment-cards-being-illegally-scammed-or-double-debited-at-the-till-35
IslandDweller, you don't need to buy the ticket from a NR ticket office to get the benefits. If you buy an annual travelcard on Oyster you get a "gold record card" which is the same thing as a gold card.

I have an outboundary annual travelcard, which is still on paper, so contactless is good for me. I don't need Oyster in zones one to six, but occasionally I need to go to Amersham or Chesham (don't ask), so I don't want the hassle of having Oyster and having to top it up. Contactless means I can now benefit from the Oyster fare without the hassle of Oyster.

If I was using it more often I'd stick with Oyster though. As for the card clash, my hipster satchel has a pocket in the front which is just the right size for an Oyster card wallet. That's where my ticket lives.
Being extremely (!) pedantic DG will be using a contactless card to travel today because Oyster uses contactless technology. You see you didn't hyperlink that very first mention of contactless card ;-)

I've always kept bank and travel cards separate so card clash is a non issue for me and I've never forgotten my Oyster card. Sometimes put it in the "wrong" pocket which caused a moment of panic but otherwise no issues.

I am, though, somewhat concerned about Michael's post about the remote validator on a NB4L trying to read a card in his jacket pocket. That's a risk I had not considered but it could apply to every NB4L plus the buses on the 507 and 521 that have extra readers. Imagine leaning on the pole where the reader is during a rush hour journey. Oh, that will be 27 fares please!

@ Timbo - there are only 33 NR ticket offices in Greater London that can handle Oyster transactions / sell an Oyster card. This is excluding London Overground run stations that have ticket offices. I think most passenger operated ticket machines at NR stations are Oyster compatible these days. Apparently 7 LU stations are devoid of a ticket office service.
Me neither, basically for all the reasons DG outlines, except mine's a monthly.

> "Don't you ever find yourself forgetting your oyster wallet?"

No, because I'm not utterly gormless.
I did take part in the Pilot, and can say that I'm one of those that will benefit. Living on the border of Zone 3/4 and traveling to offices in both directions plus occasionally working from home. Since I often do not know at the beginning of the month which way i go more often I sometimes overpaid by buying Monthly passes and sometimes even with the weekly ones. So a retrospectively applied capping is good for me (and it works, I travelled 4 days 4-6 plus 1 day 3-1 and on some busses and was charged a weekly 4-6 plus single trips for the 3-1).
Therefore the Oyster card has left my wallet permanently, thus I also avoid card clash. The only annoying thing (being one of those fast paced Londoners) is that the contacless card needs considerably longer to be recognised by the Gate.
I am a woman so clothes have few useful pockets.
I use a waistpack/bumbag.
Purse with bank and credit cards lives in main compartment. Freedom Pass, Oysters for visiting friends live in outer pocket.
I have VERY deliberately NOT activated the contactless facility on my bank card.
I also am a girl, but one who likes to travel as efficiently as possible so I always make sure any bag I buy enables me to get to my Oyster wallet quickly and easily without breaking stride. I've always kept it separate from my actual wallet for this reason so even though I've had a contactless card for ages, it hasn't meant I need to change any of my habits.
Michael's post is exactly what worries me about contactless card.

I don't have a contactless card yet (and long may that continue), but I carry my debit card in my wallet, in my bag and my oyster in an outside pocket of the same bag.
I always take my oyster out of that pocket to touch in/out, and will continue to do so, but does that mean my future contactless card, sitting in my wallet in my bag could end up getting taken before I touch the oyster?
How far is the range? How many layers of insulation does it take before the card is protected from the invisible debit waves?
A little of the "I'm alright Jack society". Many of us who have the "choice" to have a bank debit card/credit card (contactless or not) won't really give much of a second thought about those who don't. Must be fab too for those employed at a company with option of a Travelcard loan...whilst others work on "zero-hour contracts" paying their fares ad-hoc.
I keep my contactless debit card (which I didn't ask for) in my wallet folded into a piece of cooking foil. I trust and hope this should prevent it from being got-at by out-of-control debit suckers, whether on a borismaster or elsewhere. (Hint offered without guarantee, of course).
I hope you collected your free leaflet and "Watch out for card clash" Oyster card wallet from a station today.

As he handed them over to me, the TfL bloke delivered this rather flat-sounding message:

"Contactless travel is here.
Find out more.
Watch out for card clash."


But the free wallets were only being given out at one end of my commute, and only if you noticed and asked.

A brilliantly simple idea, if only they'd been available to every traveller.
I had an ineffectual woman at Holborn this morning.

And bizarrely, today of all days, I believe I experienced for the first time card clash of another type: my office ID card had slipped inside my (non-plastic) Oyster wallet, and (I think) triggered an error code. Oops! (If this cannot physically happen with that type of 'office' card, please correct me!)
Thanks for spelling the bit I needed to see within the first five lines.
I don't have an Oyster Card or a Contactless bank card.
And I don't need or specially want either. I've got my own "discount travel" arrangement.
I continue to put my tick in the box marked 'Other'
All this rather reminds me of this quote by Douglas Adams: I've come up with a set of rules that describe ...

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
I have a couple of nifty little metal cases given away at conferences for collecting calling cards. I'm wondering whether one of them would work as a protective shield should a contactless card ever be forced upon me.
Meanwhile my Oyster sits in a bureau in South Yorkshire.
£1,000 per year. You're lucky! My rail travel costs me more than £600 per month!
What Max says seems *very* important: "(and it works, I travelled 4 days 4-6 plus 1 day 3-1 and on some busses and was charged a weekly 4-6 plus single trips for the 3-1)"

Because my concern is this: let's say in the future contactless does montly and yearly capping too.
So you live Zone 2, work Zone 1. Monthly capping would be from 1st to 30th of the month. On the first you pop into Zone 3 just *once*. Then all month you travel home Zone 2 to work Zone 1, and back, and travel a *lot* around Zone 1 and 2.
Would you be capped for Zone 1-3 monthly or Zone 1-2 montly?

I just want "unlimited" travel (and pay for it), and not having to think about super-properly touching in and out and be always careful and vigilant!
The capping really is rather clever, analysing all combinations of capped zones and single fares to come up with the best value. That's part of the reason it's a rigid Mon-Sun cap, not any 7 consecutive days; for someone who travels every day it would otherwise have to keep re-analysing every day's journeys in case the most recent 7 days had a better outcome, which in turn could affect the preceding 7 and so on back to the start of contactless.
@JohnZ: you'd be capped for Z1-2 and charged PAYG for Z3.

@Andrew S: With reference to Briantist's Douglas Adams quote: if you've lived anywhere else in the world, Monday-Sunday weeklies and 1st-31st monthlies are the norm, as are (more often than not) the lack of passes involving outer zones only, so London's fare structures would be new and exciting; but for a Londoner options have been gradually decreasing over the past 4-5 years.
I won't be using contactless even though I no longer travel enough by public transport to warrant a travelcard.

This is because I prefer to decide which card I top up my Oyster with.

1) Topping up at North Harrow gives me triple Amex points on full pounds, whereas there will be the odd pence for all these contactless transactions.

2) Spending limits. My Halifax credit card pays me £5 if I spend £300 per billing cycle, therefore if I am a few pounds short in any month, I top up an Oyster.


That said, I have used contactless once - when a tourist had no Oyster and no bank card, but surprisingly enough, had cash at 5am on a night bus. Slightly against the rules I expect but have you ever seen an RPI before 8am?
@timbo “Not wanting a card which, if stolen, could be used with any security checks whatsoever…”
But the bank picks up any fraudulent spending. As I’ve said before on here, TfL aside, I cannot understand the reluctance to migrate to contactless cards. They're quick and easy to use (more so than cash in general), you get a statement of every transaction (not the case with cash), and the issuing bank has liability for any fraudulent activity (not the case with cash). (Assuming of course that you are not negligent - but in practice the banks pretty much always pay up unless people have been *really* stupid.) The cards are small and light (not the case with cash.) So what's not to like?
Also, debit card??? Who wants to use one of those? You lose the cash immediately. Why not keep the cash and use a credit card with a whole-of-balance direct debit set up? If you have an offset account, you benefit from the higher overall balance. And if you don’t, you can still do something with the cash before it’s needed to pay off the credit card balance. In full, of course.
I have reached the haven of a 60+ Travelcard - note, this is not a Freedom Pass and is not widely advertised, but if you're over 60 but still under age for a Freedom Pass, you can buy one for £10 and it's valid basically until you are old enough for a Freedom Pass. Paid for itself in a week, and I have been blissfully travelling free for the past year and more.

When I was paying for travel, though, I always updated my Travelcard online and, as I used PAYG some of the time (not all my journeys were within my Travelcard zones), I had that set to update itself whenever the amount fell below a certain level, so although travelling was expensive, it was painless and I never got stuck. I keep my Oyster in an outside pocket of my purse, and my contactless card (which I use frequently, as it's so much quicker than cash) in an inside pocket. Thus far, no problem.










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