@Bulb said:
@pjt33 said:@Weng said:
Let passengers book tickets for whatever fuckass roundabout backwards way they want - just charge them appropriately per leg.That's precisely what this system is attempting to accomplish.
Than why not just be specific about the route when buying the ticked ("this is a ticket from A to B via C, D, E and F", where A to F are names of specific stations), add up the distances and pay by that? They do it like that around here and it seems to work fine and does not need a huge manual. And not like it wouldn't be possible to do "QoS" with that too by making a kilometre (or are British railways exempt from metric system like road signs?) in the busy areas more expensive.
That's what used to happen in the early days - there were only a few trains a day, so you knew what route you were taking. Nowadays there are lots of trains, so you might not know what route you're taking until you're on the platform.
When it was all British Rail, tickets were valid "by any reasonable route" unless restricted (so you might get a cheaper "not via London" ticket, because the trains to London are full of people going to London). After all, it's all the same organisation and the money all goes in one pot. Then it was split up and privatised. There is still one ticket system, but lots of companies running trains, so the money needs to be split. A very complex computer system named ORCATS was created to decide who gets how much from each ticket. In order to do this, it needs to know exactly which trains you can use each ticket on - "reasonable route" won't do. So "permitted routes" were created - a book that lists all the ways to go from A to B for every possible A and B in the country. Feed that data to ORCATS, along with the timetable and train capacities, and the ticket database, and it works out how many people should be on each train, and hence who takes what share of the money.
Now, being programmers, I'm sure that writing a manual that lists all the ways from A to B in a usable and unambiguous format wouldn't be beyond us. Unfortunately the book that was created is diffcult to use and frequently ambiguous. Fortunately, most of the time it agrees with common sense and you don't need to look at it - and most people don't.