Lots has been written about the benefits of Oyster Card and other contactless, RFID-based, prepaid stored value cards used in mass transit systems of London, Boston, Hong Kong and a few other cities. Here’s a recent article.
During my travels in Manchester, Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich, Basel, Paris, Amsterdam and many other cities around Europe, it used to be a big pain to figure out the right type of ticket to buy, what with multiple zones, alternative routes between any two points A and B, especially when you’re running late for a business meeting. The complexity used to increase if English instructions were inadequate or missing and where fares depended upon the time of day when the travel was undertaken. Added to that was the anxiety of blowing money by overpaying or getting fined for underpaying.
Enter London Oyster Card. You tap the card once when you enter the public transport network at point A, then tap once more when you exit it at point B. The lowest fare for your route is automatically calculated after taking into account time of travel and other factors. You’re saved the trouble of having to figure out the right fare on your own. That, in my opinion, is the greatest benefit of the London Oyster Card.
Now, for one of my pet gripes about Oyster Card: While you can reload money into the card from the Internet, you have to physically tap your card at a terminal located in one of the tube or DLR stations to activate the reloaded amount (activation is not permitted on terminals located inside buses). Problem was, you have to decide which station it’s going to be at the time of reloading, and cannot change your mind later. This might be okay for everyday users taking a fixed route. But for visitors and other infrequent users like me with variable routes – some days we’d enter the public transport system at Canary Wharf underground station whereas on other days it could be at the nearby South Quay DLR station or at a bus stop at Marsh Wall – this effectively rules out the online channel for reloading our Oyster Cards. I hope Transport for London – the company that operates the London mass-transit network – recognizes this problem and removes the present inflexibility around the choice of terminals for activation of reloaded amounts.