York station barriers

[shedpete]

As you may have read in the York Press there's a proposal for London Underground-style ticket barriers for York Station.

This would be a Bad Thing IMO.

The planning application is open for comments until 9th January (they sneaked it in over Xmas...) so whether you agree or not submit your comments ASAP on york.gov.uk!

Comments

[shedpete]

I forgot to say there's been no assurance that (affordable) platform tickets will be available at all - without them it would surely be even worse.

Barriers also 'lock you in' once you go through. No wandering into town for food once you discover your train's delayed for hours.

[randomstring]

Barriers also 'lock you in' once you go through

While I'm against barriers for the other reasons you give, being locked in has never been a problem for me at any other station with barriers.

[steer]

Locked in, surely, in the sense that you can't go back out, have a cup of tea and then come back in again? That said, at leeds you can usually rely on common sense from the ticket checking people to let you head back out of the station -- I guess any similar proposal at York would need actual similar station staff to do the checking.

[randomstring]

I've always found someone to manning the barriers and been let in and out. I've never had a problem in any station with barriers.

[shedpete]

Sorry to spam my own LJ but I just have to comment on the planning system software York use - it really is a WTF monstrosity.

- First, to find the one you're looking for you already need the case number or various other details you're unlikely to have. Eventually I found it by a date search, because I had an idea of when it had been submitted from newspaper reports. WTF is there no keyword search, or a simple list to browse?

- Once you've found it, to actually find out about the application you need to go to the Associated Documents tab. And then click 'Associated Documents'. Which gives an unhelpful error in anything I tried except Internet Exploder.

- My comment was submitted via a web form. Yet when I go to check it in the documents list it opens as a PDF, of a printed out email, which has been scanned. WTF? My email and phone number had been 'redacted' by someone running a felt tip pen through them before scanning. They are both still easily legible.

Sorry, I seem to be in a ranty mood today...

[steer]

God -- that's utterly mental! What kind of cludged together system is that. Still, I guess the council has to be wired up with the assumption that correspondence will be paper not electronic. Still...

[shedpete]

After this was mentioned on the Evening Press website comments earlier today, they've now 'fixed' the felt-tip non-functionality by changing all of the scanned images to bitmap rather than greyscale, so the felt tip is now pure black. Which sort of works, but sadly the text is now also rather less legible...

[steer]

Oh dear -- ridiculous problem with a ridiculous solution!

[makyo]

They had barriers at Coventry station for a while, but they went away again after a while - presumably it turned out to be a bad idea. Coventry station is (like Coventry itself) not as nice as York, however.

[puritypersimmon]

I've registered my opposition to the Application. Not as eloquently as your good self, it has to be said, but I hope it's pithy and apposite (and surely I deserve brownie points for not swearing once ;-) ). It's a staggeringly stupid, petty and shortsighted idea, imho, and I very much hope it gets given short shrift.

[ravensthorpe]

I am not in the least bit surprised. Working for the Council I've found a complete absence of any IT skills whatsoever in the staff and no ambition amongst management to put this right. The whole impetus of management in the Council is based on muddling through to avoid having to think about how best to do anything.