Summarising the annual fares announcements has become something of an LR tradition. It is rare, however, that they carry the level of changes to TfL’s fare structure seen in the announcement of the latest fare increase. This year’s announcement represented not only a change in prices, but highlighted the acceleration of an evolutionary shift in the London fares structure that has been quietly under way for some time. Following on from Walthamstow Writer’s summary of the announcement itself, in this article we look not at its contents but the reasons that caused such sweeping adjustments to be made.
Why have discounted fares?
At the heart of London’s Fares lies a fundamental question: why do we have discounted fares – most noticeably season tickets?
From a public perspective this question is rarely asked but for some within TfL itself it is no doubt a permanently pertinent one – such as Shashi Verma, TfL’s director of customer experience, part of whose job it is to advise the Commissioner of Transport on the preferred fare structure. The Commissioner in turn, if satisfied, passes forward Mr Verma’s recommendations to the Mayor.
To many, the answer may seem obvious and the question not worth answering, having long since crossed the line into accepted wisdom. Before one can even think of applying a fares revision that is more than just adding a standard percentage to last years prices, however, it is a question that must be asked.
Back to Victorian Concepts
Historically, there have been many reasons for issuing season tickets and other discounted fares. In the old days, for example, the need to issue tickets for every journey was expensive, time consuming and a logistical nightmare. It was therefore felt necessary to offer tickets offering unlimited journeys between two specific stations for a period of time. For these to be taken up by members of the public it was necessary to offer a considerable discount, otherwise there would be no incentive for passengers to buy them.
Pricing of season tickets on the commercial railway seemed initially to be based on finding a balance between two requirements. The first was that the price had to be sufficiently attractive to make people buy them in preference to buying singles or returns. The second was to minimise lost revenue – so tickets were pitched as high as they reasonably could be in relation to the daily fare.
In those far off days it was not difficult to determine the tariff. The presumption was that people would use them six days a week and the rate would be generally set on that basis. So, initially, a weekly would probably not be justified for someone working five days a week so anxious were the railway companies not to give away more of a concession than necessary. This reluctance to give anything away extended to the point where very short journeys were priced on the basis that the season ticket holder would make four journeys a day because there would be a lunchtime journey back home.
Season tickets, as with other tickets, were strictly non-transferable. Again, allowing them to be used by more than one person was seen as a potential source of lost revenue. The principle of non-transferability has been absolutely fundamental to bus and railway ticketing for over a hundred years and, like a lot of other things, again passed into the territory of received wisdom. It wasn’t until the launch of pay-as-you-go Oyster in the dying days of the 20th Century that the general public finally had a means of buying a ticket payment card in London that was transferable – but even then it specifically does not apply to season tickets or, obviously, those who receive a specific discount such as with an 18+ Student Oyster Photocard.
The off-peak return
Another example of a discounted fare was the off-peak return. Again, it was a case of the railways wanting to maximise revenue. It was recognised that with off-peak trains generally running nearly empty it made sense to offer a fare to attract travellers who otherwise would not have made the journey. So as to not lose revenue from travellers making essential journeys, the off-peak return was priced marginally above the single fare – the logic being that anyone making a single journey was doing it through necessity and so there was no reason to offer a discount that undercut the single fare.
The reason disappears but the practice continues
The world of rail fares is full of perpetuated practices where the original reason for them has totally disappeared. A classic example is the printing of the month on modern tickets, such as One Day Travelcards. It was the railway’s practice to order special date stamps with non-standard letters for the three alpha abbreviations for some months of the year. This was done as a fraud prevention measure as it would be more difficult for fraudsters to get their hands on such a date stamp. As a consequence season tickets, when appropriate, would be stamped with JNR, FBY, MCH, JLY or DMR. When the world moved on to tickets printed on demand using APTIS or similar ticket issuing equipment this feature was perpetuated even though the reason for it had disappeared.
A 2005 Travelcard with January abbreviated to JNR instead of JAN for no logical reason. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.
Oyster: A ticketing revolution in the making
It should be reasonably obvious that once one introduces ticketless means of paying fares such as Oystercard or Wave and Pay then the historical reason for season tickets and the discount they attract potentially disappears. We’ve looked at just how much Oyster shook up the world of rail fares before. As John Bull wrote back in 2011:
A significant part of Oyster’s success has obviously been due to the massive take up of the scheme by the public at large. For the vast majority of Londoners, the Oyster card has become their key to London’s transport network – indeed it’s an apt metaphor as there are probably few commuters out there who haven’t, at some point, tiredly tried to Oyster into their house. Much of the speed and size of that takeup can be attributed to the fact that Oyster was trumpeted as a system that would meet two clear goals:
1) It would be simple to use
2) It would always find its users the cheapest fare.That Oyster met these goals is to be lauded, but that these two basic objectives had become such revolutionary ideas is a damning indictment of the fares and ticketing to be found on Britain’s Railways.
Oyster laid bare many of the problems with the established fare structure both for TfL and for the railways at large. It also highlighted that change was needed. Of course, huge fundamental changes cannot take place overnight. There is the problem of introducing an appropriate fare structure so that regular travellers are not subjected to a sudden massive fare hike or, conversely, occasional travellers are not given substantial discounts with the downward impact that would have on overall revenue.
The desire to adjust the fares structure has long been an aim of TfL and this is something they have had some limited success with over the years. The move to encourage people away from season tickets is not new. Even now the relative price of a weekly compared to a daily return on Oyster is such that for a tube-only return journey 5 days a week it is cheaper NOT to buy a weekly but use Pay As You Go. The benefits are even greater if one of the journeys is made off-peak.
This year’s announcement, and it’s accompanying documents, made it relatively clear that if TfL had a free hand on fares policy then they would have taken this desire to reduce season ticket discounts further and raise their prices relative to the weekly fare.
A proposal to increase the season ticket “multiplier”
The above documentation taken from this report in 2008 shows a failed attempt by TfL to increase the “multiplier” that determines monthly and annual season ticket rates based on the weekly rate. This was obviously deemed politically unacceptable and not implemented.
The part-time worker issue
In recent months the subject of travel for part-time workers has been something of a political hot potato. Part-time workers get no travel discount compared to a full-time worker, and in the modern world the logic of this is hard to see, especially when working less than full-time is quite usual and many people do not have sufficient job security to be reasonably sure that they will be working 5 days a week for the next year.
In a way this issue probably suited TfL as it enabled them to tilt the balance a little more away from the season ticket holder in favour of encouraging Pay As You Go. The solution to the problem was delightfully simple – just cap the daily Pay As You Go rate at one fifth of the weekly rate. Instead of headlines bemoaning the lack of a discount for weekly and longer period season ticket holders, the change is instead applauded as being of benefit to part-time workers. If nothing else this should demonstrate how important part-time workers are perceived to be in London. It probably also shows how London recognises that part of its success depends on a flexible adaptable workforce and the transport fares must therefore reflect this.
The Importance of the Weekly Cap
One of the consequences of the above announcement is that, for journeys within zones 1-6, once the weekly cap is determined then the daily cap can be calculated by, subject to rounding adjustments, dividing the weekly cap by five. Furthermore you can also determine the monthly rate (multiply weekly cap by 3.84) and the annual rate (multiply by 40). With the logic for offering a discount for a return over the price of two singles also disappearing, there are in effect only two fundamental fares that need to be priced – single tickets and weekly tickets. Everything else is a derived fare.
We have already seen TfL’s desire to increase the monthly and annual rate relative to the weekly rate. In many way this makes a lot of sense as both give quite a considerable discount, yet with the historic reasons now absent there is no real benefit to TfL in doing so. Even the argument that TfL gets the money in advance is a little hollow given how cheaply TfL can borrow money on the open market. It does look like politically they will be quite unable to change things in this area though.
What is perhaps more interesting though is the alternative of going the other way. What if the daily cap was set at one sixth the weekly cap? Obviously there would be a revenue issue that would mean the weekly cap would have to get relatively more expensive.
From January 2015 the deal basically is that if you travel to work for 5 days a week then there are two ways to travel for free at the weekend. The first way is to decide in advance that you may wish to do so and buy a weekly ticket that is loaded on your Oystercard. The second option is to simply use Wave & Pay and you will automatically get your weekend journeys for free. The beauty of this is that you don’t need to decide in advance what to do.
In the past there would be a good argument for allowing travel for free at the weekend because you would simply be using spare capacity. In other words, the marginal cost of providing this would be absolutely minimal. Since that philosophy was espoused the world, or at least London, has changed and providing capacity on Saturdays is definitely not done at almost zero marginal cost. We are experiencing situations whereby on some tube lines the frequency for much of the day on Saturdays is only marginally below the Monday to Friday peak. In such circumstances making 6 or 7 day a week users pay for more than 5 days travel would not seem at all unreasonable.
This solution for part time workers also has a bonus for people who sometimes work from home. Another failing of the rigid season ticket was that there was generally no incentive, fareswise, to avoid making a journey that may be unnecessary. Here there is probably also a bit of politics. Not only is the measure seen to assist those who sometimes work from home, and reduce peak period crowding, it is also something visible that TfL and the mayor can show to the treasury as a measure that has been introduced to provide a pricing mechanism for discouraging unnecessary travel.
Daily capping
One feature of the new fares structure which has caused some anger is the elimination of the off-peak cap from Zones 1-6. This means that the only cap in place is what was formerly the peak cap. This will be set at £11.70 in January 2015 if all zones 1-6 are travelled in.
Within the rail industry it has long been recognised that the off-peak Travelcard fare was probably set unduly low but it has been difficult to increase it much beyond inflation due to the political storm that this would produce. Ironically it is often easier to eliminate something than increase the cost of that thing by a disproportionate amount due to the adverse criticism that the latter will inevitably create. There is always the thought present in the former case that one is no longer comparing like with like.
There are various reasons why the rail firms and some within TfL think the off-peak cap was set too low. One problem was that it was disliked by the train operating companies who saw what they considered as insufficient revenue paid for a journey.
The way the cap typically worked on Oyster was that the individual journeys were identified and costed and each operator responsible for a journey would be proportionally paid their share of the capped fare for that day. It would easily be possible for an operator to get only around a half the non-capped fare. This would mean London Buses only getting around 75p in revenue for a journey.
The above, in part, provides the answer to one of the questions that many Londoners confronted by a busy four-car train in the off-peak will at some point in their lives have internally asked – just why do operators run shorter trains in the off-peak?
At least in part the answer is due to the effect the above fare proportioning has on the train operating companies – because looking at the revenue received for a crowded “loss-making” off-peak train it is easily possible for them to come to the conclusion that (even ignoring the issue of maintenance threshold levels) adding more carriages would just increase their loss even if it meant that they attracted more traffic.
One can have one’s own views on how the railways should be financed but, given that we have the infrastructure that we have, it seems madness to get into a situation where revenue received by the train operating company is so little that they have no incentive to add the carriages that they already have available in order to reduce off-peak overcrowding.
Another problem is, as one commenter pointed out on our summary of the changes, the relative cheapness of the Travelcard produces disproportionate differences in the cost of a Travelcard between the last station within zone 6 and the first station outside where it becomes an add-on to the standard rail fare (presumably to central London). As the National Rail fares have not yet been announced, we cannot yet say for certain that this difference will be reduced as a result of eliminating the off-peak cap in 2015 – but it is entirely possible.
Is there any justification for an off-peak cap?
Clearly some people think removal of the off-peak cap is just wrong. But when one looks for the logic to justify an off-peak cap that is substantially below the peak cap it is hard, in 2015, to really see that a case can irrevocably be made. On the other hand there are many arguments that can be made to show that the current setup is completely perverse.
One of the fundamental problems of the off-peak cap was that the rules were a bit complicated and counter-intuitive. Between 4 p.m. And 7 p.m. peak fares are charged (there are exceptions which will broaden in January 2015) yet the journey counts towards the off-peak cap. This confuses some people – and even TfL’s own Oyster telephone staff who arrange refunds have been known to get this wrong and not understand it.
A further fundamental problem is that the off-peak cap just produces a whole load of anomalies. How can it be right that someone who travels in the morning peak but avoids the evening peak does not qualify yet someone who travels in the morning after peak hours but in the evening peak does qualify? Maybe 20 years ago one could have argued that the morning peak is the critical peak and the evening peak is less busy. That is probably less true now but in any case the evening peak tends to be only slightly less busy, but is spread over a longer period of time. The effect of this is that both peaks tend to equally determine the number of trains required and so are both critical in determining infrastructure costs.
The night bus anomaly
Another problem with the off-peak cap is that it can effectively give a discount at times when costs are highest. Most notably costs are high at night and it was not that many years ago that bus users were charged double between midnight and 4.30 a.m. The reason this was abandoned was partly as a matter of policy, because it was felt this hit the poorest hardest (night buses being almost exclusively used by poorly paid night workers then) and partly because the doubling of fares tended to lead to confrontations. With the Oyster mechanism in place a case could be made for more expensive night bus fares. Part of the justification for this could be that journeys on night buses tend to be much longer than on daytime buses. Also some night buses are as busy or busier than buses in the peak periods.
Despite the above, it is not the case that night buses attract a premium. They can be the busiest buses but we now have the situation here where something that is busy and expensive to provide currently attracts a discount by means of qualifying for the off-peak cap. It is hard to see how this can be logically justified.
We also have the case of Sunday, and to a lesser extent Saturday, travel which due to extra staff costs is more expensive to provide. This is just not taken into account. When the Travelcard was launched there was spare capacity on existing services so it made sense to provide these at off-peak fares. With the Piccadilly Line actually running a slightly more frequent service on Saturday afternoons than on Monday-Friday peak hours it is hard to see why this should attract off-peak fares or, more particularly, off-peak caps. The Piccadilly Line is a little bit exceptional but some other tube lines are not far behind in the need to provide an off-peak service almost as good as a peak service.
You lose an anomaly and you win some
The 2015 fares structure has extended the concept of evening peak travel to zone 1 (i.e. against the direction of peak flow) being treated as off-peak. This was already the case on London Underground but has now been extended to National Rail. Clearly this will do a lot for some people to lessen the financial pain of losing the off-peak cap. Some people will actually be better off than they were before. Whilst making a lot of sense as a transitional measure, it introduces a new inconsistency as it is hard to logically accept this concept in the evening peak period but not in the morning. Of course in the evening peak period this contra-flow traffic may be largely leisure traffic whereas in the morning it is probably commuter traffic, but this still raises the question as to whether it is right to treat these two flows differently and upon what principle this is done.
The pragmatic case
Another reason that can be put forward to justify an off-peak cap is the pragmatic reason. This basically says that by removing the cap one has undesirable consequences.
Top of the list of undesirable consequences is that there is no incentive for leisure travellers or other to avoid the morning peak. Of course this should more accurately stated that there is no financial incentive to avoid the morning peak. There is always an incentive to avoid the morning peak as the trains are generally very crowded and a lot of services are actually much slower in the morning peak period.
As a contrast to the fear of more people travelling in the morning peak we currently have the well known phenomenon of the 9.30 a.m. spike. Generally the first train after 09:30 is exceptionally crowded as people chose to use it due to it being the first train for which off-peak fares are valid and the fare counts towards the off-peak cap. Indeed this choice isn’t always a conscious one – pass through a terminal well-used by tourists or occasional travellers between 09:00 and 09:30 and you’ll see staff shooing plenty of confused people away from the gatelines with the explanation that their ticket is not yet valid. By removing the off-peak cap you remove the incentive for some people (those that would qualify for the new daily cap) to wait until 9.30 a.m. It would still be the case that most people would still have a financial incentive to wait until 9.30 a.m. What the single daily cap may do then is smooth out this totally artificial peak where often the trains that are running a few minutes earlier are less crowded than the off-peak trains that follow.
As London heads for further overcrowding on its transport network, with Tube travel rising at a fast rate and numbers expected to top 1.3bn Tube journeys for 2014, it does start to appear that the idea of encouraging people to make what may be additional quite trivial journeys for no cost needs a bit of rethinking. As does the fact that the cost of a journey should in some way reflect the cost of providing it. That said, it is recognised that the idea of a daily cap is a good one and one that goes down well as a marketing concept, as people can travel knowing that in the worst case scenario their travel costs for the day will not be more than the daily capped rate.
What of the future?
Predictions are bound to be wrong but we can see the direction that TfL fares are going. TfL continue to be keen to move as many people as possible to Pay As You Go and make that the most attractive option. They will clearly continue to push for a higher “multiplier” for monthly and annual tickets in future if they feel it has a chance of succeeding in it being implemented.
It is understood that it is the intention that weekly capping will be extended to work on Oystercard, but Oystercard works in a fundamentally different way from Wave & Pay so implementation is not trivial. The algorithms for weekly capping are incredibly complex and it is unlikely the concept could be extended to monthly capping on either Wave & Pay or Oystercard.
Although the restrictions of paper tickets are largely gone, the objective in setting the fares are probably very similar to 150 years ago – making it sufficiently attractive so that people will travel but at the same time avoiding unnecessarily losing revenue. The 2015 fares structure will probably be heavily scrutinised both internally and externally to see how well it succeeds.
Oyster “internal” technology due for replacement …
http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/tfl-plans-to-replace-oyster-smart-card-technology.html
It says here …..
Whether getting rid of ticket offices, generally is a good idea or not …
TfL/LUL seem to have made a major boo-boo here:
http://londonist.com/2015/02/chaos-in-store-for-brixton-commuters.php
Even if closing Brixton T.O. is/was a good isea, doing it in the middle of these works, with the passenger-jams shown in the pictures, seems a particularly ham-handed & silly thing to do.
The BBC are reporting that Oyster PAYG / Contactless cards will be accepted for travel on High Speed between St Pancras and Stratford International from 31 May 2015. No change to the current premium fare levels and no word on how daily / weekly capping works if you travel on that route. I can’t find a press release yet giving any more detail.
@ WW if this news is correct will it have implications for use of the Freedom Pass on this route? Up until now it was not accepted at all by Southeastern High Speed for journeys between St Pancras and Stratford. It was the one rail route within London where use of the Freedom Pass was entirely verboten at any times.
@RichardB also not available Hayes & Harlington/Heathrow
I imagine the fare paid on high speed services will not count towards the cap – otherwise that would be a major change in the fare structure compared to today.
Not counting high speed fares towards the cap merely reduces Oyster PAYG and contactless to another form of payment, and makes it possible for people to travel without having to queue at ticket machines etc.
@ Richard B – no implications AFAICS. This is purely acceptance of PAYG and contactless cards. It is NOT acceptance on Travelcards nor on Freedom Passes or 60+ passes. I expect Straphan is correct in that this is merely allowing another form of payment medium (cash held electronically or a debit against an account) between those two stops without any impact on capping. I also wonder if there will actually be through fares to / from LU or other TOC services on a zonal basis or just a standalone fare. If it is a stand alone fare then conceptually that’s new for PAYG and Contactless but it opens the door to making things like fares to Gatwick Airport work.
I can’t see any Oyster fares for the High Speed journey in BR Fares.com yet but I don’t know how regularly they update their database. Tom Edwards of the BBC has just tweeted the South Eastern press release – no mention at all of capping of any sort, just single fares. Also no mention of Travelcards or passes.
“If it is a stand alone fare then conceptually that’s new for PAYG ”
Isn’t that how it works on the cable car and the riverbuses?
@WW”The BBC are reporting that Oyster PAYG / Contactless cards will be accepted for travel on High Speed between St Pancras and Stratford International from 31 May 2015.”
That’s nearly two months ago. Either the tense or the date is wrong. I can’t find nay mention of this on the BBC website
Having used the Thames Clippers many times, the Clipper fare only gets deducted from your Oyster PAYG credit and has no impact on the daily cap. You do get 1/3 off the cash fare if you have a travelcard (either on Oyster or on paper, or even if you have a National Rail season ticket that includes Zones 1-6), but that is part of a separate agreement.
Absolutely no chance that Freedom Passes (or, I think, 60+ cards) will be valid on St Pancras to Stratford high speed services unless South Eastern decides to offer this as a no-cost offer. (Is that something pink with wings and a curly tail I can see passing my window?)
@ Timbeau – fair cop. I should have typed July not May. Sorry.
@ Straphan – you are perfectly correct about the cable car and riverbuses and how Oyster PAYG is used. As I have never used either of those modes it’s not within my own experience but I was clearly suffering from brain fade when I typed the post. I think, though, I may be correct that this is the first use of PAYG in this way for a rail journey that is within the zonal area. I think all other services (barring into H’row via BAA’s tracks) have a PAYG fare from every station to every other one covered by Oyster and there is a daily cap arrangement except where you start from an out county stop like Broxbourne and go to another one (e.g. Shenfield or Grays). I can’t find daily caps for those combinations in the TfL document I have.
More bizarrely is that in checking Cheshunt to Brentwood on the NRail website and also brfares.com they both quote outrageously high cash fares – £17.80 single while the PAYG/ Contactless fare is £5.50 peak (non Z1) and £7.60 peak (via Liv St / Zone 1) but not shown on those sites at all. The TfL Single Fare finder gives the PAYG fares. How can anyone justify overcharging by over £10 for a single fare? I am surprised this scale of disparity and lack of consistent information for passengers hasn’t become a scandal.
@WW: As far as I understand:
– Most NR fares within the London Travelcard (zonal) area are controlled by TOCs and are higher than Underground fares. The exceptions (where TfL sets the fare and the fare is equal to an Underground fare) are where the stations on the route are operated by London Overground or where there is a parallel tube route (e.g. King’s Cross to Finsbury Park). There used to be a map showing who sets which fare, but I can’t find it anymore. Regardless of who sets the fare, PAYG credit spent on these journeys counts towards the daily cap for the relevant number of zones.
– There are stations outside the Travelcard area (e.g. Grays, Watford Jn) where Oyster PAYG is accepted, but credit spent does not count towards the cap. I understand the high-speed services to Stratford will fall in this category, despite being within the Travelcard area.
– Now that Southeastern High Speed accepts Oyster, the only route within the Greater London area that does not accept Oyster will be Heathrow Express and Heathrow Connect between Paddington or Hayes & Harlington (respectively) to Heathrow Central.
I understand there are still some anomalies within the system, despite the introduction of OSIs (Out of System Interchanges). For example, if I want to travel from Southall to Oxford Circus, I will be charged the standard Zone 1-4 Underground fare if I change at Ealing Broadway for the Central Line (and therefore do not touch in/out en-route), but I will possibly be charged for two journeys (or the higher FGW-set fare) if I take the train to Paddington and then change for the Bakerloo Line.
@Straphan
As FGW now charge TfL fares at Southall it shouldn’t matter whether you go from to Oxford Circus via Paddington (nothwithstanding the OSI) or via White City.
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/fares/national-rail
I can’t find the current map, but here’s a 2009 version
https://853blog.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/oysterkids.jpg?w=830
You can pay three different fares for some journeys, dependign on route
e.g Richmond to Charing Cross
via Hamemrsmith (tube only),
Waterloo East (NR only) or
change to the Underground at Waterloo (NR plus Tube)
Lewisham – Kings Cross/St Pancras:
DLR/tube (cheapest) , or
NR via Denmark Hill, or
NR to London Bridge and then Tube (costliest)
@ Straphan – sorry but I think some of what you have said is incorrect.
There are now five tariffs – LU / DLR / Overground, LU / DLR / Overground West Anglia & TfL Rail, Overground Euston – Watford Junc line, National Rail and National Rail / TfL Through Fares! This expansion of tariff versions is because DfT has TfL caught in a trap of not undercutting fares near to / cross boundaries where there is a parallel TOC service.
There are instances where TOCs have signed up to accept the base LU / DLR / Tariff and FGW is an example of this. One key factor is that the surcharge for travelling into Zone 1 does not apply. Therefore if you do Hayes & Harlington to Oxford Circus via Paddington you incur no surcharge. Compare the fares with those from the other Hayes (in Kent) which is also in Zone 5. Fares are much higher because they incur the surcharge and are summated on the NR PAYG fare. As you say some of the instances of the TfL tariff applying goes back to long standing inter-availability arrangements such as on C2C, Chiltern and Kings Cross / Moorgate – Finsbury Park.
I am afraid you are incorrect about the daily cap issue. There are peak and off peak PAYG caps at all stations including Broxbourne, Grays, Shenfield and Watford Junction. There are also 7 day caps for those using Contactless Payment Cards. Therefore travel to / from those “out boundary” destinations does count towards caps providing people touch in and out properly. I have the Jan 2015 edition of the TfL Staff Guide to Fares and Ticketing as my source for this info. Fare charts are also on the TfL website.
I also disagree with you about OSI glitches. I am not aware of people being mischarged on routine interchange journeys between FGW and LU. The only problem I’ve heard of at Paddington was a peculiar issue about people using overnight trains and their “touch ins” coinciding with the end of day data processing by the gates. I think that’s all been fixed now.
There is now a press release from South Eastern about Oyster acceptance on High Speed but it’s very limited. Doesn’t even give fares and there’s mention of the word “cap”.
@timbeau: Thanks for the links! I will need to have a look at my other half’s Oyster history to see why she raised that particular issue…
With a few exceptions, whether the TfL or NR fare scales apply follows the taxi rule – if you want to go south of the river it will cost you!
(TSGN having inherited more of the “S” than the “N” in this context)
@ Melvyn – the lease issue is old news. It went to the TfL Board months ago and the paper explains the reasoning. The decision to have MIP access and incremental spend at what will become Crossrail station is also old news. I am sure I have posted about both of these issues in the past. To be frank it has nothing to do with fares – I think you’re bending the issue to allow you to bring up something that’s old news.
[I agree and have deleted the comment. PoP]
@ PoP – re last comment I owe Melvyn a small apology as there is a Finance and Policy Cttee paper about MTR Crossrail being instructed to start the station modernisation works on the Shenfield Line.
Walthamstow Writer,
It was still a very tenuous link. Lots of things could potentially affect fares. On that basis people would be free to make comments here as a convenient dumping ground.
@WW: Thanks for clarifying. I was always under the impression Oyster was accepted at stations outside the zonal system (Watford Jn, Grays, etc.), but the fare paid for a travelcard including these stations would have been no different than buying a National Rail day return ticket with travelcard.
@ Straphan – I have not compared the pricing of caps vs out boundary One Day Travelcards. Nonetheless caps do exist for those out boundary locations. One thing I don’t understand is what happens if you travel with the zones, go to Watford Junction and back and then go to Broxbourne and back and how the daily cap is worked out for that. I assume something clever goes on to give the best value charge but cap values do vary depending on where you head.
Having just returned from my annual trip to Germany …
How do they manage to keep their fares so low?
Where does the subsidy or subsidies come from, compared to our systems, both national, regional (“Land” in German terms) or locally, i.e. within what we would define as a PTE area?
And, a probably rhetorical question – how is this politically acceptable there, but not here?
@Greg Tingey: in most places in Germany, despite the decent levels of public transport provision, public transport is still considered to be a poor alternative to the car – given their extensive motorway network. This means German policy is aimed at enticing people to switch from the car to public transport. This is in stark contrast to London, where public (rail) transport is considered essential and without sensible alternatives – and is hence priced accordingly. Add to this the fact, that the Treasury has increased rail fares by more than the rate of inflation practically every year from privatisation till 2013. London had increased them at a lower pace, but as far as I know in most years the increases were also above the prevalent rate of inflation.
Part of the German policy to entice people to use public transport is the provision of lower fares, which is financed by local authorities (bus, tram) and the Laender (rail). The federal government provides (or used to provide) grants for infrastructure investments – mainly in rail-based modes – and accepted projects with benefit-cost ratios as low as 1.33 (the explanation was that the benefits need to equal the actual costs plus the shadow costs of raising the taxes to fund them). In the UK there are plenty of schemes with a BCR of over 2 which the Treasury and DfT refuse to fund, some – like HS2 – are endlessly squabbled over (that is not to say German politicians do not split hairs over these things); and some that the DfT is happy to fund despite the BCR being well below 2 (Thameslink).
Finally, bear in mind that much of the transport infrastructure in East Germany was extensively rebuilt after unification, with the last unification projects still under construction (Leipzig- Erfurt-Bamberg high speed line). The reunification project was considered to be a ‘money is no object’ scheme, with billions of Deutschmarks spent on projects with BCRs so low that Graham H would go white and need to steady himself on the furniture if he saw them.
@ Greg – Germany is a wealthy country so has more money to spend. They seem to have a more consensual political approach in understanding the value of efficient public transport. Therefore there is a wider base of support for funding the provision of efficient services and investing in improvements / keeping assets in good condition. I think there is also a bit of a cultural thing (not confined to Germany) that changing modes to make an overall journey is not seen as something awkward – it’s simply how you travel. Of course connections are generally pretty well designed thus reducing any perceived disadvantage of, for example, changing from a tram to a bus.
The UK made a number of serious policy errors (depending on your personal prejudices) from the 1940s onwards which has put us to a comparative disadvantage. I also think we are far less consensual when it comes to politics and voters seem happy to endure swings to relative policy extremes for about 10-12 years and they get upset at what’s been done in their name and swing back the other way. That environment makes it nigh on impossible (IMO) to get sensible transport investments planned, built and in operation before someone changes the policy backdrop again. We also have philosophical differences as to the value of public / private ownership which skews policies. We also seem to have a cultural problem in creating / using multi modal interchange. People do it in London and some other cities because they have to but there is little genuine modal integration with the elimination of overlapping / competing services. This means our transport networks are almost certainly less economically efficient and with the pressure for buses to be profitable (away from London) fares are also relatively high and therefore unattractive to those at the margins who have to decide between public and private transport use. Many opt for a car instead because of the perceived flexibility and “freedom” that a car offers relative to poor quality bus services.
London has reversed some of those trends in recent years but there are emerging signs of a slowing down / reversal of positive trends of lower car use / ownership and greater public transport / walking / cycling use. Here is not the place to have the detailed policy argument for fear of moderator held axe blades sweeping close to necks. That’s my 2p worth – in short we’re simply different from Germany and have different priorities.
WW/straphan
That’s what I thought, but it’s nice of you to confirm my fears.
I was particularly impressed with getting on the (elsewhere-mentioned) M.A.N. bendy-bus in a village (Bevergern) & geting a day ticket bus-&-rail “hin-u-zurück” to Münster for something like 5-Euros.
Or a group ticket Köln-Rheine costing less than Tottenham Hale – Stansted.
Well, fares 2016 are with us now, or will be soon – but not today,apparently.
According to the BBC, ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-35213346 ) the Oyster system ha,s at lest temporarily, fallen down & travel is free ….
I assume that re-starting during a working day isn’t going to be possible, as what happens to people who entered the system when it wasn’t working, but then try to exit, if the gates/fare-collection mechanism is working?
Charging & refunding their automatic maximum fares is going to be too big a hassle, I suspect.
Anyone got any more technical inside knowledge of:
a) What has gone wrong
b) how to fix it, perhaps?
IIRC this is a new occurrence, as Oyster normally seems remarkably reliable.
It would be interesting to know how much this will cost TfL and the other TOCs. All the savings for example TfL claim to have made from closing ticket offices? Such is their stance against paper tickets that they cannot make up the difference by asking that people purchase one before travel. Anyway, many London rail stations no longer have staff or ticket gates so this could not be enforced – and why should passengers have to pay more just to have a paper ticket? There should one price for the same journey regardless if you use a paper ticket, oyster or contactless – but then TfL et al would probably find that even fewer people would use bank cards for example.
Oyster problems: The BBC link which Greg provided now says that the matter was r e s l o v e d [sic except for the spaces] “by about 09:30”. That suggests to me that somehow travel is not going to be free all day.
Spokesman for TfL on BBC news just now said glitch in Oyster caused by contractors working overnight on fare ajsutments in system. TfL would be claiming back about £250,000 lost fares from contractors.
It looks like the back office version of Oyster won’t be implemented until at least 2018.
The remaining phases of the Future Ticketing Programme are:
“Phase 3
Travelcard season and bus passes available through contactless bank cards
Phase 4
Phased adoption of technology platform resembling contactless payment to deliver 2nd generation Oyster
Phase 5
Decommissioning of current Oyster platform, once migration to 2nd generation is complete”
The December 2015 TfL board papers contained this update:
“Phases 3 and 4 were given full authority in July 2015. We have defined Phase 3 requirements and started design and development. We held Phase 4 workshops with our contractors to ensure we have a fully aligned set of
business requirements and design solution allowing development work to start. Following customer research for the mobile ticketing app, we have produced prototypes to inform the design. Phase 5 is planned to commence in 2020.
Actual date:
Launch of Phase 1 of the ticketing app
22-Dec-16
Availability of weekly capping for Oyster
customers
22-Dec-17 ”
which suggest that Phase 4 would be implemented in 2018 or 2019.
@ Matt D – and one is left wondering what has already caused the delays and what TfL will do to avoid a repeat of the long delays in getting Contactless PC acceptance into service. In some respects getting rid of “old” Oyster is a risky proposition given the need to transfer the card population across. Not having ticket offices on LU makes that task unduly involved. There is also the rumoured dependency on “new” Oyster needing to be in place to allow Oyster to work over Crossrail out to Reading. I’d therefore agree with your view that Phase 4 has to be in place by December 2019. If it isn’t then there are problems.
I hope this isn’t considered too far off topic.
Proposal to extend contactless payment to every bus in England, Scotland and Wales, with PAYG capping in all urban areas (how will that be defined?).
The proposed timescale seems glacial – delivery by 2022?
Not clear how the press release can call this proposal “complimentary to the London scheme” as the same press release also says that project scope specifically excludes tfl buses.
http://www.nfcworld.com/2016/01/13/341162/contactless-travel-every-uk-bus-2022/
@ Island Dweller – what is most telling about this latest press release (there was one from the DfT too) is that it is about contactless payment cards being accepted on buses. It is NOT about the use of ITSO which seems to be being quietly put to death. That’s how it reads to me even if the actual intent is different. The bus operators clearly see a benefit from CPCs because it translates notes and coins into an electronic monetary transfer from customer accounts to the bus company. Think about all the cost savings from effectively outsourcing all that coin counting, safes, coin floats, accounting, banking etc. If they can also get transaction times down even marginally then bus journeys will speed up. I note there are passing references to PAYG travel and daily caps but that’s not going to be easy to deal with in a deregulated environment, local authorities with no money and fares inconsistencies going back decades (e.g. cross boundary travel between different companies or councils).
I also love the way that “5 big bus groups” equates to every bus in the UK. I can think of a few independent operators who might be a tad annoyed by that inference. I know the release mentions 1,200 operators across the UK but I’d be surprised if their interests were to be looked after by large scale competitors. From a London perspective I assume Greater London would remain an “island” in terms of contactless travel given the very limited number of commercial cross boundary routes into Greater London. This mirrors the different regulatory structures for bus services.
“Not clear how the press release can call this proposal “complimentary [sic] to the London scheme” as the same press release also says that project scope specifically excludes tfl buses.”
It is precisely because it will not include London that it is complementary to it. If it were intended to include London it would be an extension of, or a replacement for, the London scheme.
“
Not sure if relevant, & it’s already been noted, but:
TfL no longer publish proper fare tables, same as they don’t publish proper timetables.
“Because it’s for mobile-phone users”
What about those of the rest (the majority?) of us who use bigger screens, or who want a printed copy.
I might quite easily want intermediate time between say King’s Cross & Chorleywood, because someone want to get on the same train at, say Finchley Rd, or Harrow?
Or, as “the boss” does, she want a fare-table, printed out, at work, so when she makes a for-work journey, she can just read it off/print a copy & the accounts/.expenses department will take that as the fare.
Without having to enter the specific fiddly details every damned time.
Customer service?
What’s that?
A replay of the “improved” web-site saga I suppose?
Greg Tingey,
Can we stick to facts please? TfL do publish timetables where it makes sense to do so. So in the case of King’s Cross and Chorleywood there is a complete timetable which can be found as a pdf here. Admittedly it is in the first and last trains section which isn’t helpful. There is nothing stopping you printing it out. Traditionally, printed timetables were provided because it was impractical for the traveller to printer their own but in this day and age it is a more reasonable thing to expect them to do.
The various tools available to find what you need to know for your journey are excellent and varied. If you really, really want a timetable there is nothing stopping you downloading (or printing) the working timetables.
PoP
Oops, I picked the wrong example, didn’t I?
I actually tried this for the far reaches of the Piccadilly Line about 9 months back & failed to find a “proper” timetable – which doesn’t mean, as you say, that one might not exist somewhere ….
But:
AFAIK there are no proper fare tables any more though, & “Diamond Geezer” has also mentioned this lack in this post as you probably know?
How lovely to see that TfL have had to fork out £22m to the TOCs as “compensation” for the revised capping arrangements.
“In addition, fare income is down by a further £22m across the Group due to a provision for payment of compensation to the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) for lost revenue as a result of introduction of daily capping in January 2015.”
Source – http://content.tfl.gov.uk/fpc-160708-07-ofr-ipr.pdf (page 11)
IIRC that’s rather higher than TfL had originally expected.