Am going to go to a tube station and try this OEP thing tonight. I’ve read on the tfl website it’s free but I’m doubtful!

So if I live in Zone 1 and have a Zone 1 and 2 travel card on my oyster and wish to travel to Zone 6 on a National Rail train, I first need to get an OEP. This is easy enough for me to do as there is a nearby tube station.

BUT for the return journey I must first find a “ticket stop” in an area of town I’m not familiar with and get an OEP added to my card so I can use PAYG Oyster on the way home???

Well, we’d never had any need in the past to think much about these Oyster card thingies we’d vaguely heard north Londoners talk about. So we decided to check up TfL’s website to get some idea how they worked, how much it costs etc.

Now, I don’t think either of us are thick. I work as a lecturer in Computer Science, I read papers on computational theory as part of my job. But neither of us could make head nor tail of what we found on that website. It just didn’t seem to be saying clearly what these things are, how exactly you use them, how much it all costs. Instead, it left important basic things out, while diving into little unimportant details. Both of us left that website feeling enraged and confused. Asking staff at stations didn’t help either, some just gave us “dunno” type answers, others said things that quite clearly contradicted what we thought we’d understood eventually after much effort from the website and literature on the Oyster.

Look – we have heard there are over a hundred staff working for TfL on salaries of over £100,000. Both of us feel we’d gratefully take on the job, for half of that salary, of writing literature and websites explaining things like Oyster cards, and feel we could do a much better job than whoever it is writes the stuff now. I have to explain far more complex things than that to my students in my job, and half £100,000 is still more than I earn.

And I thought my tone was pretty measured – as they have been incredibly intransigent for so long over the whole thing and kept local people unable to use their Oyster PAYG for far longer than necessary. In fact, I believe that First Capital were virtually the last Train Operating Company to agree to this.

So – I am sure they can live with my criticism. The ‘mad’ bit refers to them not selling the Oyster Extension Permits at their rail stations! As I would have thought it might be helpful so to do.

But as you will see in my piece – I do say that it is a good news story and therefore I am termporarily stopping railing at them!

But the Oyster Extension Permit, as bad as it may be (and it does sound pretty poor) isn’t actually FCC’s fault, is it? It’s the same across all of London as I understand it, and therefore is presumably some naff committee decision. Maybe FCC supported it, maybe they hated it but couldn’t get it overturned, but it seems simplisitic, unless you have inside knowledge, to lay the blame so squarely at their feet and call them “mad”.

What’s the story? Is it indeed FCC’s fault? Or would a more measured tone be appropriate?