devlog

The Oyster card is the RFID based payment system for the Tube (subway) network in London. Up until January 2007, i would not allow myself to get an Oyster card. These were my reasons why:

• Price-based access enforcement to collective transport networks is a mistake; public transport should tend to be free. Free-riding behaviour isn’t a negative effect; it forms part of a social safety net. In most European cities, ticketing is basically an ‘honesty system’, in-transit ticket checking is rare, and most people *do* pay. Distrust-by-default is not the behaviour of a system in which i want to live.
• RFID based access systems are a misinvestment - what use are sophisticated demand models for traffic analysis, when the money that should be used to upgrade the network has been spent on access systems? TfL faces many, many millions in hardware and software licensing costs per year, because their tender process was not transparent. Decryption power increases more than exponentially, replication hardware becomes cheaper, and RFID is likely to time out as a ’solution’ within a few years.
• Plain old gut-feeling-ugliness about the fact that all one’s movements are tracked, combined with the same ugliness about the fact that access price is being used punitively to force people either onto the Oyster system, or off it.

This January, TfL put the cash price of a single ticket up to 4 pounds - 6 euros - 8 dollars. I couldn’t sustain the hit any more. I bought an Oyster card for cash. My mother has registered hers, and uses the ATM machine to ‘top up’, just as she uses the ATM to ‘top up’ her phone, because that’s the simplest interface to the system.

These are some things i have noticed.

• Oyster hasn’t fixed one of the core problems it was meant to solve - the queueing problem. In the abstract, queueing problems fascinate me. Instead of a long queue moving quickly, a queue 1/3 the length moves 3 times more slowly per transaction, because the contents of the transaction are more complicated. Most of the ticket machines only accept coins, and now go almost 100% unused; the one machine that will accept debit/credit cards has a queue just as long as it did pre-Oyster. When that machine breaks down, humiliating chaos ensues.
• Oyster is startlingly de-humanising for the people who work inside the systems. Bus drivers in particular are now hidden behind plastic screens. Instead of looking at the passengers, they are looking at the internal CCTV to make sure no-one is getting in the back door. I can’t remember the last time a bus driver met my eyes. There’s no more conversation to have - ‘top me up’ doesn’t lead anywhere, in the way a destination does.
• The technological flaws in the Oyster system have exposed a command-and-control response in the vocabulary that describes the system. There’s no time or room to say ‘please’. One standard message is “Customers Must Touch In And Touch Out, Or They Will Pay The Maximum Cash Fare”. On a typical journey one hears and sees this message at least 6 times. One only needs to get off the DLR, forget to touch out, and get stung for four quid, once, to remember not to do it again. Flaws in the system punish its users, but then they’re being threatened over and over in a way that’s not necessary, because some new users always appear, and there’s no way to filter the messages.
  
  This bugs me in the way that collective live/work spaces covered in little sticky notes telling you what to do or not do, bug me. If a system is covered in little labels telling you how to use and not use it, then there is something wrong with the design. I want to see less words in the world, and better ideas.

I have other reasons to avoid the Tube system. One is that i am very sensitive to the flicker in overhead fluorescent light, and this seems to get worse as i age. I can *feel* my brain fuzz and my mood dip as i walk into a neon lit space. All the lighting on the tube trains is cheap, and the Central line, always the most useful for me, feels especially nasty.

I also feel semantically overloaded by the constant barrage of advertising on the Tube. London has the cleverest and sneakiest advertising industry in the world, and its subjects are advertising’s test subjects. This is nothing new - you can look at pictures of tube stations from the 1930s and there is as much large size advertising then as now. Some advertisers are starting to learn that if you shout at people, they switch off; I see less large vivid text, less oversize pictures of peoples faces and body angles suggesting sex. I find my eyes are drawn to mixed palettes of light natural colours, green/blue, and see many more ads using this scheme now. But then the message fades away; i remember the imagery, but not the product. Display advertising is provably a waste of money, but people do it because it’s easy, and because everyone else does.

So i catch buses to the edge of Zone 1, and i walk, usually for several hours a day. I see weird things being carried out in the open that i never saw before - specifically women being used by men to trap and exploit other men. I see well dressed pretty girls begging at cashpoints, and men coming up to them and issuing them with instructions. The streets around Brick Lane and Kings Cross where a lot of “sex workers” used to hang out, have been “cleaned up”; now i see girls in vests in the freezing cold, standing in groups of four in the traffic island right in the middle of Bishopsgate outside Liverpool Street station, in full view of CCTV, with a man watching from a car on the other side of the road.

At these times I do not know what to do. I stop and take a long hard look, and then i walk on, aching inside and helpless to help. I design systems, model networks and make map-making tools; I am not a street crusader. A lot of public agencies claim to ask for my comments and suggestions, but feedback is a two way street, that’s only being driven down one way. I want to help fix London, but i don’t know where to start, and i think i’m just going to run away.