All the Marshlink halts (GTR) have had a card only TVM with TOD for at least 5 years and ITSO card readers for the last couple of years.
Non-existence or poor reliability of TVMs is surely something in favour of going contactless, where the only thing that needs to work is a simple (and presumably fairly cheap) yellow reader with no moving parts, and which can easily have multiple units installed at each entrance to even small stations. Having TVMs available for things like checking fares, checking accounts, and buying long distance fares is useful, but is a nice to have, rather than essential.
depends what indexes to the database you have. No index, and SQL will build one.On my other PC I'm presently working on a database which has a table with 2 million records in it. Querying those records on an indexed key pair takes a fraction of a second.
Technology has caught up, you know!
but select * from {file} where zone = '3' would be slow
Yes, and there are about 10 times that many stations in Britain. Any lots of journeys where there is a choice of route, sometimes at wildly different fares.
But the idea is to implement it in just the SE of England and to process it in the back office, so that shouldn't be a problem I would think
Right, so what should the peak fare from Gatwick Airport to Reading be? £15.05 (half the current "via Gomshall" SDR) or £38.20 (half the current "+Any Permitted" SDR), or something in between?
About a third to half of all British stations are located in the proposed area. So there are still orders of magnitude more station-to-station combinations than across the entire NS network.
Or fit gatelines within stations. No one thinks it odd to have separate gatelines for the underground and National Rail at mainline terminals. Fitting them at places like Reading, Farringdon and other large interchanges seems perfectly reasonable.
It means that you can only ever have a contactless-based system, not a smartcard-based system. Meaning that you are extending credit to passengers, and cannot reliably verify whether someone has touched in.
I agree that means a contactless-based system, but that seems the trend worldwide as that doesn't require separate cards. But that still doesn't make it impossible to verify whether someone has touched in, I would think. Why would it be impossible to reliably verify a touch in if the validator sends card numbers in real time to a database? As long as it is checked regularly if each validator functions correctly, you can see in the database if someone touched in. The only differences to a smartcard-based PAYG system is that there is no balance known and no history on the card itself.
But there comes the problem. How can you be sure that you always have the latest list of validated cards? And what do you do if there is no signal (either for the validator, for the verifying device or both)?
You can at least show the time of update, which should be later than the departure time, but you could also check latest update time of specific stations.
There is also another way: blocking a card until the problem is resolved
And if that ends up stranding someone miles from home?
No different than if they don't have any money. I don't think we are talking about people having made an 'honest mistake', more multiple times not paying the fare.
But they may have money on the blocked card, so it is potentially worse.
Buying a paper ticket or contacting staff who should be able to unblock a card for example
If the passenger is clearly at fault, then agreed, this is not a regression from the current system.
The proposal specifically intends to remove the option of buying a paper ticket.
Every single platform/exit/entrance needs to have a contactless tap point for the system to work properly. That will be challenging to achieve throughout the ex-Network SE area, in contrast to a smaller compact system such as the Manchester Metrolink. This proposal to force use of contactless payments and prohibit the use of paper tickets seems to me a "bridge too far" for this vast area.
Of course it would, which is why no competent DBAwould ever permit "select *" to be used in any query.
'Select *' is ok. It's the 'where' that's an issue if there is no index to use.