OK – it’s how many years that we Londoners are using the oyster card as means to get around town? That’s those of us who can’t afford the Bugatti just yet with the congestion charge on top of course. Two or three years? We’re about to approach three years if I am not mistaken.

There is a clear benefit in relieving the waste disposal of several dozens of tons of waste a day through replacing the paper based tickets with a plastic card with a money charged chip on it (yes we’re talking RFID). But the Oyster Card has also changed our experience when travelling.

In the past four days three friends of mine were caught in three separate instances in the barriers simply because they did not have sufficient funds on their prepaid card. And all were totally baffled, insisting that they have travelled on that very day enough to qualify for a day ticket.

You don’t know what that means? Well let me explain: There is a special tariff: a day ticket. With this ticket you can use public transport as much as you want for the duration of a day – you simply pay a fixed amount of money. The pricing scheme is designed to make this day ticket attractive if you use the tube more than three times a day. For a sprawling city like London that makes this ticket very attractive for a lot of people.

The Oyster Card is supposed to work like this: You use it on the Railway, Tubes, trams and buses and as soon as all the single tariffs accumulate a day tickets worth the Oyster card allows you to travel as if you would have bought a day ticket at the start of your journey.

My friends, who were so surprised at not having enough funds on their Oyster Cards all thought that the heavy use of their oyster card on this very day made them qualify for the day ticket tariff.
Now the question is are my friends all really crap in maths or was the “system” wrong.

Well it doesn’t really matter here – since it’s worth pointing out one major thing: We are not longer consciously aware of how much we pay for public transport since the experience of paying for a journey has significantly changed.

In pre-Oyster Card times we had to make our minds up whether we will use the transport often enough on the very day to opt for a day ticket. And there was no doubt whatsoever how much we paid for the travelling. Today we trust a system to cap it in our favour. And since it is out of our hands, we automatically foster some form of distrust.

Is it a fair question to ask how good we feel about using Oyster Cards and trust them to cap in our favour? I for one know that I would love to have a little switch on my Oyster Card which I can press knowing that on my first “Touch-In” I will have started my day ticket!