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| One Day Bus and Tram Oyster card |
I’ve found
an article on the London Reconnections
website and they have interviewed Shashi
Verma (TfL’s Director of Technology and Customer Experience) about
unlimited transfers within 1 hour for the hopper fare.
I would like to re-produce this in my article:
From London Reconnections
Two
for one Bus Hopper
At a technical level, the new Hopper ticket is reviving existing
functionality within Oyster rather than creating new functionality. This is
why it was possible for Transport for
London to deliver the manifesto pledge within a few months. The Oyster
system, which was introduced in 2003,
has been reconfigured to allow transfer
between buses or bus and tram.
In terms of process, when a passenger taps
their card on the Oyster/contactless reader a series of checks are made on the
card. At the most basic level: Is there enough money? With the introduction of
the Hopper ticket a new question was introduced: Have you boarded a bus or tram
within the past hour? If yes, a 100%
discount on the £1.50 about to be charged is to be applied. The 2-for-1 ticket
works by fully discounting the cost of the second bus or tram leg of journey.
Two functionalities in the workings of the
Oyster card are being used to create the
Hopper: time since last boarding and fare discount. Both are already used
for integrated fares such as when transferring from national rail services to the Tube. The time and the discount are
configurable. The former could be anything: 15min, an hour or a month. The
latter anything from zero to 100%. “Configure it to 60mins and a 100% discount.
That’s how you create a £1.50 in an hour”, Shashi Verma summarises.
Because the 2-for-1 Hopper is reviving existing functionality rather
than create anything new the price tag
is under £100,000. To set this in perspective, the programmed roll out of Contactless on rail across London came to
£68m.
Multi-Buy
Hopper
Whilst rolling out to the 2-for-1 Hopper
could be turned around with a few tweaks
to the Oyster and Contactless card code, allowing unlimited transfers within an hour is more complex.
“So, to do that on Oyster is seriously difficult.” Says Verma. “Very, very difficult.
Because we have to get into quite fundamental
functioning of Oyster.“ Unlike the 2-for-1 Hopper, which uses existing
functionality on Oyster, an Unlimited Hopper would require making changes to
the Oyster card back-end product itself.
It is currently possible to code the
Unlimited Hopper for Contactless. This is because the back office of
Contactless is newer and more accessible than Oyster, whose own back end dates back to the early 2000s. The back end for
Contactless allows TfL to create and process data differently from Oyster – in
short, more easily. “The mess is the same mess you find with any IT after 15
years. It starts to look a bit old”, Verma adds.
The intention in the long term — not just
for the Hopper but in general — is to upgrade the back office of Oyster to the
same level of service as Contactless, including linking the two systems. This
will allow the complicated fare rules stored in the more sophisticated
Contactless back office to act as a single source of information on those rules
for both systems. In practical terms this would mean a tapped Oyster card
charging a passenger for their trip but also talk to the back office of
Contactless. If that passenger is making
their third or fourth bus journey within the hour, the Contactless back office
can then see that and issue a refund to the card.
This merger of the back offices of Oyster and Contactless is currently set for
2018. Once complete the Unlimited
Hopper can be introduced. Yet, this will likely not be the biggest thing to
come out of that eventual merger. This will be weekly capping on Oyster – fare
capping for travel between Monday and Sunday at the price of a 7-day pass.
This is currently only available for
Contactless users.
The back office merger is part of the wider
Contactless programme which began in 2011. The first phase of the programme was
launching Contactless on buses in 2012, followed by the roll out of the system
across the Tube in 2014.
“The third phase is being done on an
extended basis – because unlike the first two phases the third phase is a bit
more messy.” Says Verma. “This is where we get into all the complex technology
behind Oyster.”
This phase started with upgrades to the
telecom infrastructure over the summer. The upgrade will also allow the topping up and buying of tickets to become
even easier, via an app with instant delivery rather than the next day as
currently. Verma reiterates, however, that although the tweaks may seem
small they get into the fundamental functionality of Oyster and are therefore
not trivial to make whilst ensuring the system keeps running without hiccups.
The main
thing here is that the daily price cap remains at £4.50, which gives you
unlimited London bus rides for one day.
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