Thanks Google AI Overview - UK Rail penalty fare speed-run

@benjojo it still blows my mind how they sometimes have contactless but no oyster and I think the other way also exists or (at least) existed

@nicoduck @benjojo I'm pretty sure everywhere which does Oyster also supports contactless.

The reason there are places which support contactless but not Oyster is because the Oyster card uses 4 bits to store the fare zone and we ran out of zones...

@russss @benjojo yeah looks like they added that a while ago. I think 10 years ago the buses only had oyster but not contactless.
And: lol, I thought it might be a political issue why oyster isn't available outside of London and not a technical 😅

@nicoduck @russss It's also kinda political-ish in that it's likely a bad look (though maybe sensible???) for Transport For London to just take over all of the over travel sectors of the country, given the UK generally wants to move away from "everything is in London" syndrome, (though as a Londoner, of course this is great)

I think also there is a general unwillingness to expand Oyster, as it's a expensive 3rd party contract that I'm sure in a ideal world TFL would not want to have

@nicoduck @benjojo the other issue is that the Oyster system is outsourced to Cubic, while the contactless system was developed in-house by TfL, and is presumably cheaper to run.

So I think TfL eventually wants to get rid of Oyster entirely in favour of contactless, and they definitely don't want to spend lots of money upgrading it.

@russss @nicoduck hah, snap

@benjojo Those are about different stations. Cambridge != Cambridge North.

@noisytoot Yes, but if the contactless zone does not extend to Cambridge , it wont extend to Cambridge North.