Re: City Rail barriers often wide-open

["Mike Alexander" <malex@bigfoot.com>]

> On several of the occasions I mentioned, I didn't notice that the
> barriers were open and couldn't nut out why my ticket wasn't accepted
> in the slot until the attendant, who was standing nearby, tapped me on
> the shoulder or spoke to me or waved me through.

This is a very easy mistake to make, once you are used to the system.
Whenever I have seen gates open in Sydney or London, there is always a
crowd of people wondering why their ticket won't go in, and with all their
interest focussed on the slot, they fail to notice that the gate is wide
open!

My question is: why can't the ticket be accepted when the gate is open?
Presumably the gates are only open because there is no staff member to deal
with the inevitable unreadable ticket/lost ticket/etc and they don't want
to lock people in. So why not leave them open, but enable the slot as
usual?

Or even better, just leave one gate open, and at least most people will
still go through the other gates as per normal, leaving the one open gate
for "problem cases".

In Melbourne, the gates still accept the tickets when they are locked in
the open position. This is necessary here, as they are also acting as a
validator. If they all did not accept tickets, then the passengers entering
at that station would be travelling on unvalidated tickets, and would not
be able to leave a station at the end of their journey if it also had
gates.


-- 
Regards,

Mike Alexander
(malex@bigfoot.com)