Incomplete journeys on Oyster - swiping out and in mid journey.

Last month I travelled from Holborn to Barking changing at Bank and Limehouse (where one has to swipe out of the system and back in again to change between DLR and c2c). A couple of days ago I logged in to my Oyster account, and an incomplete journey was flagged up -  a very useful feature.

I looked in my diary, and saw that I had been to Holborn that day, so I supplied Holborn as the missing swipe. However, when I went to the journey history, it transpired that the missing swipe was the one at Limehouse c2c, so now I have a journey from Holborn to Limehouse and amother journey from Holborn to Barking.

Now it seems to me that Oyster should be able to work out the journey I actually took from the times, or make an assumption that as I live in Barking, and had travelled from Barking to Holborn, that my return journey was Holborn to Barking. Maybe this is a refinement that is on the cards.

In the meantime, this could be fixed by the way the Oyster website works. I can't reproduce the presentation of the problem  so I don't know what options I had, but I think that the user should be taken to the journey history to assess the missing swipes there.

Bikes now allowed on Docklands Light Railway (off-peak)

http://road.cc/content/news/108510-bikes-be-carried-docklands-light-railway-trains

Following a (successful, obviously!) trial last summer, bikes will now be allowed on DLR trains off peak. One of the best things about this is that it opens up two river crossings to cyclists.

New ATOC London Connections Map out

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/passenger_services/maps/London_Connections.pdf

The new map "effective from 23rd May" shows the DLR branch to Stratford International with "opens Summer 2010". It doesn't show the street level interchange between Dalston Kingsland and Dalston Junction that TfL show on their maps such as their (arguably) most useful one the 'Oyster Rail Services Map' (the effective successor to TfL's London Connections Map, which did not colour code National Rail lines at all). Trains will run through from Dalston Junction (East London Line) to Highbury and Islington (North London Line) from May 2011 and the train service between Gospel Oak and Stratford resumes next month.

Website content guru Gerry McGovern has written about the benefits of technology. Surprisingly close to some of the material used by Peter Joseph - including in his weekly (ish) blog talk radio show on the web (24 March episode), McGovern writes:

"The relentless march of technology-generated evidence is everywhere, from teaching, to medicine, to website management. And what are we learning? That doctors and web managers make much better decisions when they have evidence, data; facts, not opinions. We need to embrace technology and allow it to extend our capabilities. If we resist, and believe in the infallibility of humans, we don’t undermine technology—we undermine ourselves."

McGovern's point of departure is the use of technological aids for football (soccer) referees. He argues that they should not be prevented from benefiting from this technology any more than any other. He scoffs, basically, at the idea that humans should stop extending their capabilities by use of technology - the decision of when to do so must surely be arbitrary.

At the Z-day event in London, one of the speakers recounted how a passenger on the Docklands Light Railway was freaked out by the lack of a driver on the train, such that they had to put someone up front to 'pretend' to drive. This shows the underlying belief that a human is more reliable than a machine - which is patently untrue (perhaps not in every example, but generally overall). We see technological advances in cars from automatic gear boxes, through ABS brakes to SatNav. It is not lack of technology that stops the driverless car appearing, but the mistaken belief that the human must ultimately be in control.

http://newsweaver.ie/gerrymcgovern/e_article001706037.cfm