The capital is your Oyster - train travel just got a whole lot easier
London
In the London scale of things, it ranks as but a minor irritant, much like the battery running out on your mobile phone or temporarily misplacing the television remote control before Match of the Day.
But last week one of London's more irritating enigmas was finally cracked: the rail companies agreed in principle to integrate their ticketing operation inside London with the public transport smartcard used by virtually all Londoners and millions of tourists: the Oyster card.
It ranked as a small inconvenience to regular suburban commuters used to switching daily between paper tickets on the trains and smart cards on the Tube and buses. But to occasional users it was infuriating. Especially the GBP10 (HK$158) fine.
Occasional rail travellers not used to such discrepancies are regularly held at suburban ticket barriers to have their details laboriously noted and a fine issued.
Perhaps the worst offender was the Silverlink-run North London Line service, closely linked with the Tube network and one that features on the London Underground map, but which ran a bizarre ticketing system that ignored the Oyster, even though its stations connected scores of Tube stops in a long loop from gritty North Woolwich in the southeast through north London to leafy Richmond in the affluent southwest.
When politicians spoke of an 'integrated transport network', anyone once held and fined at ticket barriers on the North London Line laughed.
As of November, the line comes under Transport for London (TfL) control, and under it the umbrella of the Oyster card. Hurrah!
From 2009, all 250 London overland and underground rail stations and services will use Oyster.
It makes you wonder why the train operators took so long, though the GBP20 million 'bribe' from TfL to help pay the set-up may offer a clue.
Using Oyster makes sense. It has been one of Mayor Ken Livingstone's major successes. Launched only four years ago, an Oyster card halves the cost of travel on buses to GBP1 a trip, and can cut a single Tube fare from GBP4 to GBP1.50. Some 95 per cent of Tube journeys and three-quarters of bus trips are now cashless. The technology is spreading, too. The London Evening Standard, in a major circulation coup, has launched its Eros card (named after the fabled statue in Piccadilly and the paper's logo), in which readers - mostly rushed suburban commuter types - merely touch their card on the electronic reader to grab a paper.
Progress, perhaps, as it may put the Standard vendors (possibly the last of the cockneys, along with street market traders) out of business, all in time replaced by US-style newspaper boxes opened by a magnetic card. No more cries of 'Read all abaht it, L'ahn Ee'en Stan'ard!'
Still, if posed the question: if you can buy a paper with the touch of a magnetic card at a railway station, why should you queue for a train ticket?
Last week Barclay's Bank launched its nattily named OnePulse Visa card, a credit card that ties in with Oyster on public transport trips and allows cardholders to buy goods under GBP10, such as sandwiches and newspapers.
No more need for chip and pin; no more need for signatures. And no more need to spend 20 minutes of your lunch hour queuing for a baguette and a smoothie - another major irritant, only mildly less annoying than being forced to queue up to be fined for not having a ticket you thought you automatically had on an Oyster card. Roll on 2009.
