This Is Not A Blog Post

I was going to write a blog post about the newest manifestation of Saveaways.  They've gone all hi-tech, you see. Smart Saveaways first became available on the 24th November, bringing ticketing on Merseyside into the 21st Century.

This isn't a proper Walrus card, I hasten to add.  It might have Walrus written on it but that doesn't mean a thing.  That scheme - to introduce a Merseyside version of the Oyster card - was announced to great fanfare in 2011.  Season ticket holders would be using it by the end of 2012, with pay as you go in 2013.  It's nearly 2015 and it hasn't happened so don't mention it.  Just pretend no-one said anything.  Ignore that Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire and Tyne & Wear are all rolling out their own smart cards.

I was going to write about how the new Saveaways are not able to be pre-loaded with cash, like a pay as you go Oyster.  I was going to write how, if you have a Smart Saveaway, you have to take your card to a shop and ask them to put a day's travel on it.  I was going to point out that I could do that right now, if I wanted to buy a paper one, and so the fact that it's got a magnetic strip means nothing to me.

I could have written about how you can't buy a Smart Saveaway over the internet, or how you can't top it up online, or using a ticket machine in a bus or rail station.  About how you can't buy one in advance, like you can with a scratch-off Saveaway, so that you can have a spontaneous day out if the mood takes you.  About how my nearest Pay Point is actually in the opposite direction to my nearest bus stop.  About how there will be a £1 charge for registering it after the 1st of April.

There's probably a lengthy and detailed blog post to be written about how Merseyrail will not be issuing or crediting Smart Saveaways, and will instead stick to the paper version.  I could probably get quite a lot of humour about the fact that Merseyrail ticket inspectors will have no technology to check if your Smart Saveaway is actually valid, so, in the words of the website:

In other words, to make sure you don't get fined for not having a ticket, carry a piece of paper with your paperless ticket at all times.  Unless there's a station with ticket gates.  There's a whole eight of those on the Merseyrail network (assuming that the one in Chester accepts this smartcard, which isn't guaranteed as it's outside the County line).

And I could probably get a bit of wry fun out of the fact that when they opened the new Ferry Terminal two years ago, it came with smartcard readers, but they won't be used in 2014.  Instead you queue up, show your Smart Saveaway to a person at the ticket office, and they'll give you a boarding pass for the ferry.  Saving you absolutely no time at all.

In short, I probably could have written a lengthy, extremely angry blog post about the Smart Saveaway being inconvenient, pathetic, ridiculous, customer-alienating, a blight upon Merseytravel, and a major cause for red faces among everyone at Mann Island.  However, it's all just too bloody depressing, so I shan't bother.

Plastic Fantastic

Exciting news in the Merseytart household: I got my TwoTogether railcard through the post.  It was only launched on Monday but I was straight in there with my £30 and my passport-sized photos. 

(Obviously I'm not going to put a picture of my real railcard up there, leaving myself open to all sorts of fraud.  What do you take me for?)

In case you missed it, the Two Together Railcard was launched after a trial in the West Midlands as a way of giving pairs of people a cheaper way to travel.  You and another named person are on the card, and if you get the train together, you'll get a third off your travel.  It's really that simple, and is well worth getting with a mate and shoving in a drawer on the off chance.

I got it with the BF, but don't hold your breath for a sudden upswing in the quality on the blog because I've got a pet photographer with me at all times.  For starters, it's not able to be used on most Rangers and Rovers, my ticket of choice for a day romping around the provinces.  Secondly, the BF isn't particularly enthused by the idea of walking between stations.  He's not big on walking.  He's not big on stations either.  In fact, probably the only thing that would persuade him to come out with me on a tarting trip is if we went to just one station, and there was a tea room right outside, and then we went home again.  So the 1/3 off would be pretty much wasted.

It's there in my wallet if we need it though, like my Oyster card and the Bite card that gives me 20% off at station food outlets and I always forget to use.  One card that might be added to it in the not-awfully distant future is the Walrus card.  You might have forgotten about the Walrus.  Launched in 2011, this was going to be the smart ticket for all of Merseytravel, our version of the Oyster card.  All the season tickets would be on the smartcard by 2012, with pay as you go use in place by 2013.

This didn't happen.  In fact, a comprehensive review last year called a halt to the whole project and a re-think of what the Walrus was going to deliver.  They concluded that the timeline was way too ambitious.  Meanwhile, TfGM has announced its "my get me there" card, Nexus have got their "Pop", the Glasgow Subway has a Smartcard - basically Merseytravel has been left behind.

A report to the Merseytravel committee today will suggest a new path forward: the Walrus card is going to replace the Saveaway.  Sort of.  Merseyside's One-Day Travelcard will be available electronically to Wirral passengers from the Autumn, and the rest of Merseyside by next year. 

Expert travel analysts and, well, pretty much anyone will notice that this is a bit rubbish.  The Walrus has been demoted from an all-encompassing smartcard scheme to an update of a 1980s scratchcard.  The report notes that the Saveaway has the advantage of anonymity, so there will be none of those pesky customer details to slow things down.  Of course, the pesky customer details are exactly the point.  A weekly Trio customer, or a monthly Solo passenger, wants to be able to renew their card at home, on the internet, in front of The Cube.  It frees up ticket office time.  It frees up personal time.  It frees up the space in your purse that was taken by a big flappy bit of plastic, four times the size of rest of your cards and getting more creased and illegible every time you used it.

Meanwhile, more irregular customers - people like me - want the freedom to chuck £20 on a card as a backup.  I could have that in my wallet for my trips to Liverpool and back, and also have it there in case I fancy getting a bus somewhere, or I change my mind and decide to head to Southport instead of Ormskirk.  A smart card gives you freedom, opens up new journeys, and lets computers do all the hard work of topping up and checking.  Plus - and I realise this will displease Julian Assange - all that customer detail is a fantastic resource for the transport executive and passenger alike.  I can't be the only one who's logged into his Oyster card just to get a weird thrill out of seeing I've been tracked all over the capital.  (It'll also help to discourage extra-marital affairs for exactly the same reason).

I can buy a Saveaway and go out for the day right now.  I did it last week.  It was easy.  It makes no difference to me if it's paper or electronic; I still have to go up to a ticket office on the day and hand over some cash.  And remember, you can't buy Saveaways on buses, so even though I'll have a Walrus card in my wallet, unless I've been to a shop or railway station first to put money on it, it may as well be my membership of the Dennis the Menace Fan Club for all the use it will be.

It's a sop.  It's a "will this do?".  It's a fig leaf, to cover up the fact that it's been two and a half years and nothing's really happened.  If Merseytravel couldn't - can't - handle it on their own, then they should just go over to Manchester and ask to borrow the get me there card for Liverpool.  In fact, if they did that, joining the two cities with one card, it'd be a lot more convenient for everyone.  It'd certainly be less pressure on my wallet's stitching.

Like Playaway, but with less Brian Cant.

Bad news for anyone too young to buy a scratchcard. From today, you won't be able to get the same empty thrill of rubbing off a bit of foil for very little gain from a Saveaway any more. They're on their way out.

Actually, that's not entirely true. You can still get one of the traditional Saveaway tickets, valid on all of Merseyside's public transport, if you go to a bus station or newsagent. If you choose to buy it from a Merseyrail station though, from March 7th, you'll be given something that looks remarkably like a train ticket - a special version of the one-day rangers available for other railway routes. Good luck to the first couple of people explaining it to the bus drivers. ("Yes, I know it's a train ticket, but it's valid on this bus. Yes, it is. It is. Oh look, is that the pavement zooming up towards my face? Yes, it is.")

Presumably this is a much overdue attempt to bring the Saveaway ticket into the 21st Century. It's always been a brilliantly anachronistic, and charming, little item. You have to scratch off the day, month and year you're going to use it, so they can be stored months in advance, and then fold a piece of sticky backed plastic down over the card to seal it.

No matter how hard you try, no matter how long you spend on it, no matter if you are using a robot in an air-tight vacuum, you will always get a big crease in the plastic. They're specially designed that way. Thousands of tiny microfibres, invisible to the eye, are inlayed into the plastic like velcro, and they magically draw together as soon as they detect oxygen. It cost Merseytravel billions of Council Taxpayer's money to come up with this innovative polymer, but they agreed it was worth it because the look of frustration and anger on people's face as they fold it over is frigging hilarious. CCTV footage of people trying to not get a crease in their Saveaway is usually the highlight of the Christmas party at Merseytravel Towers. Usually this crease will go over the date, so the ticket inspectors will have to give it an extra squint, to enhance the comedy humiliation.

The Saveaway's a brilliant idea, and an absolute bargain. If you're planning a day trip to, say, Southport, or New Brighton, it's worth getting a Saveaway just for the freedom it affords you to leap on and off trains and buses. It's also worth bearing in mind that it's valid on the ferries, though they keep that quiet at the terminal to try and get you to pay again.

The move to a train-ticket-style Saveaway means that it can be used in the ticketing gates at seven of the stations, freeing up a bit of capacity, and leading to more thorough checks. And since it's computer printed with the date, it'll also mean an end to those chancers we've all seen on the trains, saying "Oh, I just forgot to scratch the box off" to the inspector, while wielding an untouched Saveaway that's clearly been kept in their back pocket for a couple of months.

While the bus technology remains behind its train equivalents, we won't be seeing a complete end to the scratch-and-stick Saveaway; it'll probably be around until Merseyside gets its own version of the Oyster card. Which by the looks of it, probably won't be until the dawn of the next millennium.