London's old contactless Oyster card technology has had its back ends tidied up, with a number of changes making it easier and faster to buy and add tickets to the system.
For a start, anyone buying things online through the card's web site should now be able to have their tickets and travelcards automatically transferred to their cards when they tap in at any train station, a system vastly more user friendly than the old method of having to nominate a particular station for a pick up. Tickets should also be ready for use 30 minutes after purchase now too, replacing the old maximum wait of 24 hours for digital travelcards to be delivered.
Later in the year it'll be possible to collect travelcards from the card reader terminals on the buses too, with a new TfL app coming in August to handle top-ups and ticket purchases from smartphones, view PAYG credit and loaded tickets, and ping out notifications should the balance reach a critical, you're-getting-done, level.
Other small tweaks are also on the way to the neglected Oyster card, with the "Hopper" hourly charge caps and weekly limits coming soon to bus and tram trips -- and a Journey History set to be added to the TfL app by early 2018. [TfL via Engadget]
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