The Thames river bus service, The Thames Clipper – which zooms past my flat on a very regular basis – has announced that it is to start accepting Oyster PrePay cards from November.

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/11479.aspx

Still to be confirmed is whether the total cost will be charged to the PrePay card, or if the existance of a PrePay card will simply allow passengers to claim the “Travelcard holders” discount on the fare which is then paid in cash.

I had slightly given up using the Thames Clipper as I no longer have a monthly travelcard and couldn’t claim the discount. Paying £5 for a trip felt a lot worse than the discounted £3.35 I used to pay.

The boats are a lot, lot nicer than the tube and the seats are more reminsant of travelling on a nice aircraft than on a form of mass public transport. Also, my snobbish side also quite liked getting on board and asking for a ticket “to the Savoy please”

It would have been nice to have had this ready for the summer months though, as that is undeniably the most pleasurable time to take the boat into the West End at weekends.

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/16/uksecurity.terrorism/print

Now that the Oyster card can be hacked, we learn that MI5 thinks the system is good enough to assist in preventing terrorism.

The two situations don’t quite sync.