TfL have issued a press release confirming a number of fares for the Elizabeth line. It can be read in full here, but the key tables are reproduced below.
Peak services
| Heathrow to/from: | 2018 Heathrow Connect fares | Proposed Elizabeth Line Peak PAYG fares | Difference to current Heathrow Connect fare | Daily Cap |
| London Paddington | £10.30 | £10.20 | 10p cheaper (1%) | £12.50 |
| Hayes & Harlington | £6.30 | £6.20 | 10p cheaper (2%) | £12.50 |
| Southall, Hanwell | £6.90 | £6.90 | £12.50 | |
| West Ealing-Greenford | £8.00 | £7.30 | 70p cheaper (9%) | £12.50 |
| Ealing Broadway/Acton Main Line | £8.00 | £7.30 | 70p cheaper (9%) | £12.50 |
| TfL Zone 1 stations | £12.70 | £12.10 | 60p cheaper (5%) | £12.50 |
Off-Peak services
| Heathrow to/from: | 2018 Connect fares | Elizabeth Line off-peak PAYG fares | Difference to current Heathrow Connect fare | Daily Cap |
| London Paddington | £10.30 | £10.10 | 20p cheaper (2%) | £12.50 |
| Hayes & Harlington | £6.30 | £6.00 | 30p cheaper (5%) | £12.50 |
| Southall, Hanwell | £6.90 | £6.00 | 90p cheaper (13%) | £12.50 |
| West Ealing-Greenford | £8.00 | £6.00 | £2.00 cheaper (25%) | £12.50 |
| Ealing Broadway/Acton Main Line | £8.00 | £6.00 | £2.00 cheaper (25%) | £12.50 |
| TfL Zone 1 stations | £12.70 | £10.10 | £2.60 cheaper (20%) | £12.50 |
John
Have you noticed the lack of zone 3/2 via Ealing Broadway? Seems that would be a popular choice for people in west London given how slow the pic line is. for example East Acton, Ealing Common would seemingly have to go to Ealing B (£1.65) tap out then tap in and get a £6 fare to avoid a £10.10 London zone 1 Fare.
But still no word on what the oyster fare on Express will be?
@ISLANDDWELLER
It’s worth noting that a similar Oyster stand alone fare on HS1 between STP and SFA is half the relevant peak/off-peak return fare. It’s cheaper on Oyster between 0930 and 1000 because TfL’s ofpeak starts earlier…
@Dan
I would assume that table is a summary. It shows fares to some Zone 3 stations (Ealing Broadway, Acton Main Line) so why would the fares to other Zone 3 stations that can be reached without going through Zone 1 (e.g Acton Town) be any different?
Zone 2 isn’t mentioned, possibly because there are no Crossrail stations in that Zone (at least, not in west London), but whatever arrangements there are for through travel from Zone 2 (e.g Stamford Brook) to the GWML (e.g Hayes & Harlington) via Ealing Broadway (i.e not via Zone 1) will still work, even if the fare has not been listed on that summary.
I don’t know if there are pink readers at Ealing Broadway to confirm the route.
I was a bit confused by the table as the Heathrow Connect prices are bolded, not the new Elizabeth line ones.
Since it will be Oyster-enabled … what about the “Geriatric’s” pass users ( like me 😀 ) ? Given the practical difficulty of “changing useable ticket” so to speak somewhere about Airport Junction ……
Greg,
Read the linked press release. I interpret that as you travel for free.
Is this the first press release to mention the service pattern that will operate from this May (i.e. the same as now)?
@Timbeau
One of the example fares given in the press release is Shepherd’s Bush (in Z2) to Heathrow via Ealing Broadway. It’s the same price as another example: Heathrow to Ealing Broadway (which makes sense as Z2-6 fares are the same as Z3-6 fares).
Does Heathrow Connect have an evening peak fare at present, or does it, like most of national rail, only charge extra for the morning peak? Perhaps there will be one or two unhappy bunnies!
I find it puzzling that we can spend a fortune on a massive new tunnel under London and vast new stations, but that to get to Heathrow still pay a surcharge because the final bit of track and tunnel belongs to the airport.
Indeed aren’t the off peak prices to Heathrow still more expensive than the Oyster off peak prices to Gatwick (on non Express trains)?
That looks very complicated – and not welcoming to visitors. If even it is seen necessary to charge extra for Heathrow (others don’t), it would have been much easier to simply add a single fixed surcharge.
But then, my feeling is for a while that TfL is more interested in ticketing technology than sensible ticketing systems…
Even after December, they’re still only offering a miserly 2 trains per hour from Hanwell. Why does the new Pad > Hayes service stop at every single station en route (inc Acton Main Line) but omit Hanwell?
I appreciate it’s not as busy as Southall but there’s a sizeable number of folks getting on and off at Hanwell and it’s hardly going to cost a huge lot in terms of time or money to stop & dwell at hanwell for a couple of minutes.
Christian Schmidt,
It is not complicated at all. You touch in. You touch out. You get charged an appropriate fare. That’s a sensible ticketing system.
You may think the fare structure needlessly complicated but, given the sensible ticketing system, do ordinary people really care?
Bunny Parker,
If by December you mean December 2019 then that is not true. See Elizabeth line future service pattern Reading to London.
What’s that got to do with fares?
@Bunny Parker
“it’s hardly going to cost a huge lot in terms of time or money to stop & dwell at Hanwell for a couple of minutes”.
That’s a couple of minutes they haven’t got. It seems the only way they can squeeze the trains in (and remember those four tracks have to cope with everything from IEPs to 1,000 tonne stone trains) is for the local services to skip one or two stations – specifically half the trains (the Heathrow ones) will call at Acton and Hanwell, and the other half (for Slough and points west) at West Ealing. Any train calling at all three would have something else bearing down on it before it could clear Airport Junction.
In any case the full service will be 4tph at Hanwell, not two.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OsS6hrNelW8/V76Gd4XM6UI/AAAAAAAAW_0/-5bhaz2oo_Yck8CKpzueDqJT1ImO5BY0ACLcB/s1600/crsrailpattrn.gif.
timbeau,
That is a very old out-of-date diagram. It has been superseded. The biggest giveaways are the West Drayton terminator and the lack of a service to Terminal 5.
What was the final result of the TfL vs Heathrow legal process over access charges, or is that still ongoing
@PoP
I stand corrected. I couldn’t find a more up to date one, and I believe it is still correct as far as Hanwell is concerned.
PoP
Thanks – that bit didn’t show in the press releases I saw earlier, hence my question …
So that, like you if I read that correctly, I can get to LHR by the ex-“connect” service for nothing, after the due date ….
For those who want the excrutiating detail and background to the decision then here is a link to the Mayoral Direction on fares.
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/md2245_heathrow_signed_pdf.pdf
Walthamstow Writer,
Thanks for the link. Sad that I am, I read it. I think the only bit of any real significance is para 1.16
So basically, all done to try to avoid losing income from businessmen and tourists whilst at the same time trying not to charge a premium for Londoners wherever possible.
I think it is quite clever what they have done. They have largely protected the premium fare but given concessions to benefit children under 16, 60+ etc who retain free travel. Also by including it in the daily cap they have made the maximum fare seem far more palatable. Make a journey to or from Heathrow using the Elizabeth line and we will throw in free travel in London for the day for a nominal charge!
I can just see the subliminal message on the adverts. Travel by Heathrow Express and you pay £25 to Paddington. Travel with us and we will give you all your travel for the day for half that amount. Maybe there is a none too subtle attempt to deprive Heathrow Express of its customers so they throw in the towel and free up 4 further slots per hour for Elizabeth line trains to Heathrow.
Didn’t see this article when I posted on the other thread. Pretty frustrating for Hanwell residents, we were led to believe we’d have 4tph from May 2018. Will 4tph start in Dec 2018 or Dec 2019 then?
Bunny Parker, timbeau,
There is also the interesting question of which stops are included in the Heathrow Connect replacement service and which get shifted to the Reading/Maidenhead trains for pathing reasons. As timbeau points out, a two minute addition to a journey for a station stop is not insignificant. On the diagram timbeau referenced it was only West Ealing that got shifted to the Reading/Maidenhead services.
To relate this to fares, the fewer stops from Heathrow to Paddington, the more attractive the Elizabeth line will be compared to Heathrow Express. A fraction of the cost but not that much longer a journey. Just how much longer we won’t know until the draft GW timetable is published for December 2019.
Geo,
Who knows? I have not seen anything published and suspect they are deliberately keeping it quiet until they are sure what they can do.
The only thing I can helpfully add is that it is part of a strong TfL ethos to provide at least 4tph whenever possible and I am sure if they can go to 4tph in December 2018 then they will do. Actually that is probably 2nd January 2019 as the timetable change for Great Western may well be delayed until the Christmas improvements are implemented.
Seems expensive, but I suppose that’s Heathrow’s fault, not TfL’s.
I presume this means fares from Abbey Wood and Woolwich (Z4) to Z1 will be £2.80 off peak and £3.30 peak versus £3.00 off-peak and £4.10 peak on Southeastern from Z4 to Z1?
I’d previously read it was up in the air and could well have been as expensive as SE.
“The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and TfL have today announced that Elizabeth line pay as you go fares within Zones 1-6 will be the same as the fares on existing TfL services, ensuring affordable travel for millions of Londoners when the railway opens through central London in December this year.”
Three other notable things I’ve spotted in the Mayoral Direction.
Firstly the publication of the Direction and any associated press release was withheld for 2 weeks awaiting a DfT decision on “Zone 6 allocation”. I assume this is a reference to the DfT being content that Travelcards and Caps covering Zone 6 would be accepted on Crossrail.
Secondly there is a nice little reference to the “Crossrail project” having always had a “public position” about the existence of a premium fare into Heathrow. Not quite sure what role the project team has in setting TfL fares but looks like a bit of a deflection tactic to me.
The public position adopted by the Crossrail project team has always been that special fares would apply to Heathrow and that that these special fares would be “comparable” to those on the current Heathrow Connect service. This position has been generally accepted by stakeholders given the very significant service improvements being provided.
Thirdly TfL are negotiating a new deal with HAL for the continuation of discounted season tickets for Heathrow employees / airport workers. Somewhat surprised that HAL does not fund these directly but that they are a “goodwill” gesture by GWR / Connect.
I can see the point that PoP is making about regular travellers not being overly disadvantaged by these fares decisions plus the “we’re half the price of HEX” marketing line. However the one off fares are very hefty and if you’re a local in West London then you’re not that much better off than now. Peak fares from Southall are little changed so I can’t see much transfer from local buses to Crossrail unless workers are allowed to benefit from reduced rate travel to work at the airport. I haven’t fully absorbed all the details around the individual fare levels but it is yet another layer of complexity on what is already a very complicated set of PAYG fares across London.
@ The MurkyDepths – it is worth just noting that despite all the press headlines about “Crossrail fares being the same as the tube” the Mayoral Direction (MD) itself is ONLY in respect of fares to be applied from May 2018 to / from Heathrow on the TfL rail service. The MD says nothing about fares that apply from December 2018 when the core opens. The press froth today also completely misses the fact that fares on the Shenfield Line are on a separate scale to the tube and will remain so. I would not be shocked to see something emerge about a different scale applying for Woolwich and Abbey Wood or for some sort of deal to be struck about trying to better align fares from those stations into Zone 1. It won’t be possible to distinguish between people who use Crossrail or Thameslink from Abbey to Farringdon for example. Given there is open interchange on to the tube at Farringdon then people will be able to reach anywhere on the tube from there having arrived on Thameslink.
And before Timbeau pops up to berate me about fares on South Western I know there are loads of examples where TOC PAYG fares differ from those on TfL services between similar origin and destination pairs. I just think Crossrail *might* be a catalyst for some tweaking.
I expect the Mayor will have to sign off two further MDs towards the end of the year – one for the 2019 fares revision (likely to incorporate weekly capping on Oyster based on milestone dates in the latest TfL budget document) and another one for Crossrail fares to apply from 9 December 2018 (when the core opens).
Pedantic of Purley,
It is very difficult to work out beforehand how much you pay. (And yes I meant fare structure when I wrote ticketing system). There are quite a few people to whom cost matter, who cannot just pay whatever is demanded but must make decision on fares.
I do think the TfL fares structure is confusing, and I wonder if TfL either aims to or accepts that it is doing the same as, for example, many mobile company, that is confusing customers with an array of options that has them ending up paying more than necessary because it is too complicated to find a cheaper option.
@ C Schmidt – I agree the various PAYG fare scales are confusing. There are now also problems with the relationship between Travelcard seasons / daily & weekly caps and “frozen” TfL fares as caps have kept rising. Something similar now pertains with bus fares due to the Hopper (now “unlimited”) increasing the number of buses you can ride before hitting a cap and seriously undermining the relationship with the Bus and Tram Pass (season). IMO it is really quite stupid to break longstanding relationships between daily outlay and season tickets. You make a longer term commitment to public transport use (courtesy of a discounted price) a less viable option for increasing numbers of people. This undermines TfL’s “cash in the bank” up front and also means people are less tied to your services. Is it any wonder people are flitting about using other services and that trip rates on TfL services are declining? Obviously there are other external factors causing change but TfL seems not to be in charge of its fares policy any more.
TfL do, at least, try to explain some of these issues for people who have web access and can be bothered to dig around in their website. Furthermore, with the exception of fares on the route to Gatwick, you can broadly assume that you will be charged the lowest fare for the trips you make by the application of relevant caps. The main issue for passengers is that they touch in and out properly as they travel. If people don’t or can’t (due to technical issues) then they will get whacked with excess charges. I don’t think TfL set out to rip people off by virtue of a complex fares system. After all the reason for such ridiculous complexity is political and the demands of various Mayors, Chancellors of the Exchequer and Transport Secretaries pulling fares in all sorts of directions. And that is not a single party issue – both Labour and Tory governments and Mayors have their share of responsibility for the mess.
@WW
” The press froth today also completely misses the fact that fares on the Shenfield Line are on a separate scale to the tube and will remain so.”
I’ve been up and down the TfL Rail line using my Oyster and I don’t know what you mean by this. You can travel via Liverpool Street and it’s treated as a tube interchange, you don’t get charged more changing to the tube at Liverpool Street (Z1) or Stratford (Z2/3).
I think there might be a residual discount being applied for some of the outer fares, perhaps?
Braintist
I THINK what’s meant is that NR point-to-point fares still also apply, if you want them.
Same as the other lines taken over by Tfl as “Overground” in my part of London.
There’s a good reason for this:
The differential between an annual Z1-3 & a Walthamstow Central – LST Annual season is about £600 ….
A lot of people use point-to-point seasons & carry an Oyster card for other uses, when not on thier usual commuting line(s).
@Walthomstow Writer personally I think it’s a deliberate long term ploy to reduce the value of weekly/monthly/annual tickets vs single fares and daily caps. This is because:
* whilst having the cash up front is good for cash flow and customer lock-in, these aren’t that significant for TfL. Plus needing the cash up front makes these tickets less accessible by those on lower incomes, and leads to complicated arrangements like employer loans or ‘Commuter Club’ loans.
* requiring people to estimate their travel usage in advance and calculate the best ticket to buy undermines the simplicity of the ‘just tap in and tap out for the best fare’ message.
* Weekly/monthly/annual tickets give discounts to people who need to travel for full time, regular work, vs part time or irregular work. The latter group is disproportionately women and lower income.
* selling tickets, even via self service ticket machines, costs more and requires more staff and space, compared to PAYG.
It will be interesting to see, once Monday-Sunday capping is introduced to Oyster in December, whether weekly travelcards will eventually get withdrawn. I imagine there will be a big push to get Oyster weekly travel card users to switch to PAYG.
@ Briantist – I can assure you that a different fare scale applies to journeys on the Shenfield and West Anglia lines. There is also a retained fare and rail only season tickets just as far as Liverpool St. You are quite right that people on those routes (where PAYG is available) are no longer charged a “Zone 1 add on” fare if changing to the tube. TfL pay Greater Anglia a few million quid a year to ensure the fares via Tottenham Hale (not a TfL run route) are aligned with those via Edmonton Green. There are not massive differences in fares but there *are* differences on some journeys. If you need to be convinced then look at the Oyster-Rail website run by Mike Whittaker and his Fares Guide. Of course TfL can no longer be bothered to produce proper fares tables that would show these differences and instead force people to use a fares finder that hides these tariffs from full view. And yes I accept many will prefer the fares finder but I’m a tedious traditionalist who likes to have this stuff readily accessible. Heck you now have to go through umpteen more steps to even find travelcard and cap prices as a result of another “improvement” to the website. 🙁
@ Frankie Roberto – yes that’s all fine and dandy and I’m sure you’re correct about some of the motivations we’re seeing. The enormous problem is that I don’t see the DfT or the TOCs going in the same direction. What we have now are two opposing forces, Khan and Grayling, pulling fares policies in opposing directions. It remains to be seen who wins but let’s just say Government typically has the whip hand. If we believe the suggestions I’ve seen elsewhere about how the SoS is behaving then he will keep taking decisions that place TfL under ever increasing financial strain. He’s prevented TfL increasing penalty charges for motoring (civil) offences, he’s refused to freeze Travelcard prices as demanded by the Mayor and there is apparently no desire to restore highway maintenance funding to London. I am just waiting for the next crunch point to arrive.
Talk about removing Travelcards is all lovely too but it is a statutorily protected product so TfL can’t dump it no matter how much the resident “brains on sticks” who ruminate on such things may like to. I also suspect a press / social media campaign opposing Travelcard withdrawal would soon have the Mayor rowing back and issuing denials. It is noteworthy that something similar to this happened yesterday when Mike Brown was quoted by the Standard as saying the cycle hire scheme might be dumped. Within minutes Will Norman, the Cycling Commissioner (a political appointee), issued a blunt denial via social media saying Mr Brown had been “misquoted”. So that went well – not! I simply cannot see the point in scrapping Travelcard as product – as soon as you move to a perceived (note that word) charge per use product you raise people’s awareness of what they are paying each time. This is a by-product of shifting people to Contactless – they see money come out of their account for each trip (or cap) and are now reconsidering whether they get value for money. There is certainly published feedback that indicates that some passengers don’t think they are getting value for money and therefore scaling back their use of TfL services. Another reason, entirely of TfL’s creation, behind declining trip rates.
@WW
” I can assure you that a different fare scale applies to journeys on the Shenfield and West Anglia lines.”
OK, it’s just I can’t see it using the TfL “Single Fare Finder”…
Oxford Circus Underground Station to… Off Peak Peak
Stratford (London) Rail Station: 2.40/ 2.90
Chadwell Heath Rail Station: 3.10/ 4.70
Harold Wood Rail Station: 3.10 /5.10
Gidea Park Rail Station: 3.10 /5.10
Goodmayes Rail Station: 2.80 /3.90
Seven Kings Rail Station: 2.80 /3.90
Ilford Rail Station: 2.80 /3.90
Manor Park Rail Station: 2.80 /3.30
Forest Gate Rail Station: 2.80 /3.30
Maryland Rail Station: 2.80 /3.30
Shenfield Rail Station: 8.60 /11.60
Brentwood Rail Station: 5.40 /8.20
District Line…
Bromley-by-Bow Underground Station 2.40 /2.90
Upton Park Underground Station 2.80 /3.30
Upney Underground Station 2.80 /3.90
Dagenham East Underground Station 3.10 /4.70
Upminster Bridge Underground Station 3.10 /5.10
@WW I’m sceptical that this is one of the main reasons for the drop in passenger numbers, but perhaps it’s a factor. Do you have a link to the published research?
I’m not suggesting that TfL stop accepting travelcards – that would be problematic as other train companies can sell them. However they could feasibly stop selling the weekly travelcard on Oyster once the Mon-Sun capping is in place. Those are effectively the same product (at the same price), except that the capping is Mon-Sun only for technical reasons. (Alternatively, both might remain available in the medium term, but with publicity pushing people to the PAYG cap).
@ Frankie re the access charge case – HAL lost its application for a Judicial Review
The case was actually HAL V ORR though obviously TFL took a keen interest in it and were listed as an ‘interested party’ along with the CAA and DFT
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-40059659
http://www.keatingchambers.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Heathrow-Airport-Ltd-v-Office-of-Rail-and-Road.pdf
Thank you BrightonReader for supplying me with very interesting Saturday evening reading matter. A most interesting decision!
Any idea what the fare charges to Reading on the LizzieLine might be? Will the oyster work that far out? I seem to remember that there was talk of putting Reading Station plus all the local bus services onto Oyster at one point, or did I dream that? And will my soon to be acquired freedom pass get me as far as Reading?
Extending Oyster to Reading is the plan, but will open a whole can of worms.
First of all, there is the question of whether Oyster will be accepted on long distance trains calling at Slough and Reading and, if not, how that will be policed given the common barrier lines at Paddington (upstairs), Slough and Reading. fares. Paddington itself can’t be de-Oystered if Heathrow Express takes Oyster.
Secondly, what will happen to the Windsor, Marlow and Henley branches. Would they remain as little isolated Oysterless enclaves, like the Shepperton branch?
Thirdly, and most complicated to resolve, as both Gatwick and Waterloo are Oysterised, will Oyster be accepted on trains from Reading to those destinations via Wokingham? If not, how will that be policed (again given common barrier lines at Gatwick, Richmond etc). Will an Oyster touched in at Reading and out at e.g Gatwick be charged the fare via the direct route or via Zone 1 (i.e Farringdon).
Fourthly, if Oyster is accepted for travel to Redhill/Gatwick or stations Feltham/Waterloo via Wokingham, will the intermediate stations be Oysterised? Note that one of those intermediate stations is Guildford, which would create a similar anomaly unless you also Oysterise the intermediate stations on all three routes between there and London (via Woking, Cobham and Epsom (and note who is the MP of the latter!) You would also have an odd situation at Farnborough and Dorking, in that Oyster would not be accepted at the station with a direct service to London, but would be accepted at the other. (Although Dorking station is already odd because Oyster is accepted on the bus to Leatherhead but not on the train).
Is it likely to be politically acceptable to extend the Oyster’s tentacles so far into Surrey and Berkshire, and even Hampshire?
Beno
IIRC, at present, the proposed normal Oyster limit is Slough ( = Z7? ) with special zone fares ( Like those used N of Northwood on the Met-line ) beyond there out to Reading. ( ? )
[Slight rewording for clarity. PoP]
Following comment originally by Greg Tingey moved (and reformatted) from ‘Cutting it fine’.
The main press reports didn’t cover it, but, if you go past all the unctuous guff in the actual TfL press release, down near the bottom it says:
And that is an official, public Tfl statement.
Which I take to mean that, for instance, that my over-65 “pass” is fully valid.
The following from the official press release: MD 2245:
Mackay,
Your comments have been deleted as has my response to them. As you clearly did not even have the courtesy to provide a valid email address, we have no opportunity to discuss this offline.
We are not interested in political point scoring on this site and have no intention of providing a facility for others to do so. If you think otherwise we could have discussed this in a civilised matter but you have denied us that opportunity.
@TIMBEAU – Glad that the plan is to accept Oyster on Elizabeth Line all the way to Reading. Ref the point about whether it will be accepted on the GWR Long Distance services if PAD HL takes Oyster on HEX, wouldn’t it be straightforward to have a dedicated gateline for the HEX-only platforms and “de-Oyster” the other PAD HL platforms? I know that this perpetuates the dedicated HEX platforms and doesn’t solve the multiple other problems listed, but as I understand it no Elizabeth Line services will use PAD HL once the Core is up and running for through services?
I guess this does leave a question of how to deal with the remaining GWR Thames Valley semi-fasts, and whether Oyster will be valid on them (ideally yes?)
B&T, timbeau,
Yes, this opens up a complete can of worms that needs sorting out.
To look at part of timbeau’s issue in another way, the big question is ‘will guards on the GWR Reading – Gatwick service be issued with Oyster readers?’ There must already be the (rather minor) issue that someone could conceivably legitimately travel between Gatwick and Redhill on GWR service using a contactless method of payment and the guard can do little except verify that the person physically has an Oyster or Wave & Pay card.
It makes logical sense for Reigate to be included in the Oystercard area once the limitations of the card are overcome (later this year if not already) which would make the above problem a bit more of an issue.
On B&T’s comment about the Thames Valley semi-fasts, logically it would seem hard not to include them given that they will call at Twyford, Maidenhead, Slough, Hayes & Harlington and Ealing Broadway. The service in terms of number of station stops will be broadly comparable with the semi-fast trains on the Elizabeth line.
At Paddington platforms 10 and 11 and also platforms 12 and 14 (there is no longer a platform 13) are gated separately. Thames Valley trains will almost certainly arrive at one of these pairs of platforms in future so there should be no issue in having a Oyster validity at Paddington for only the semi-fast trains.
@PoP – Thanks, that makes sense. Also… A dedicated gateline at PAD HL for the HEX platforms solves how to recognise differential Oyster charging for HEX services. Anyone using those gates gets hit with the HEX supplement with no further checking / discrimination needed elsewhere. Only hope that HAL / HEOC get billed for the costs of moving / fencing them!
“* Weekly/monthly/annual tickets give discounts to people who need to travel for full time, regular work, vs part time or irregular work. The latter group is disproportionately women and lower income.”
It would be nice if TfL took account of the fact that the former group disproportionately contributes the most in taxes to fund them as well.
The Fares press release is the first official confirmation that TfL Rail will not be running Class 345s to Heathrow from May
There is no reason to expect that 60+ Oyster and Freedom pass acceptance will be any different to Reading than it is Shenfield.
The cards are currently valid on all TfL Rail trains to/from Shenfield but are only valid after 0930 on Mondays to Fridays and at weekends on Greater Anglia trains as far as the Zone 6 boundary. In practice this is Harold Wood. This is fine now as you can buy tickets at Stratford outwards from the ticket machines for Harold Wood/Shenfield.
I believe West Drayton is the Zone 6 boundary station. When going to watch London Irish play at Reading I buy a Zone 6 to Reading return at Paddington and travel by any train.
@ Greg Tingey (0815)
“special zone fares ( Like those used N of Northwood on the Met-line )”
Moor Park is Z6/7, the other Herts stations (Croxley, Watford, Ricky, Chorleywood) are Z7, Chalfont is Z8, and Chesham and Amersham are Z9. There’s nothing special about them since they changed to numerical zones rather than A-D (traditionally shown as ‘special fares apply’).
The Special Zone fares cover Watford Junction, Shenfield, Broxbourne-Hertford East and stations outside Z6 to Grays and Gatwick (inclusive).
I cannot imagine Reading being anything else but special zone, but the other stations could all be numbered – though Twyford would almost certainly have to be double-digit (and only really given a number because why not – it would be a unique set of fares, but so is Brentwood).
@ Briantist re: the different prices on TfL rail (and Liverpool St Overground lines) vs the tube
The excellent http://www.oyster-rail.org.uk site explains all in its Fares Guide (I can’t seem to get links to work). I would list all the differences, but it’s a long list and I’ve decided to just summerise
The differences in fare concern:
– Liverpool Street NR, where there’s reduced peak fares vs Z1 for Zones 8 (ie Cheshunt) and 9 (ie Brentwood). And for some bizarre reason its 10p more expensive from Brentwood-Liverpool Street NR off-peak than other Brentwood-Z1 journeys.
– Zones 7-9 have different prices (generally more expensive) for many journeys compared to LU scale: which makes some sense as Z7-9 aren’t really continuous.
– Many off peak journeys within Z2-6 are more expensive than on LU. Instead of a flat £1.50, it’s £1.90 for 3 zones, £2.40 for 4 zones and £2.60 for 5 zones. Harold Wood to Stratford is £1.10 more expensive than Upminster to Stratford.
SI: Watford Junction though has different fares / pass availability depending on route chosen though. Using the DC is accepted but not the ‘fast’ services on the mainline (though you can use those on oyster pass as far as Harrow & W)
I’m looking forward to my free trips to Reading though 😛
Oyster is valid on ‘London Midland’ (TfL haven’t updated it to London Northwestern Railway) and Southern services at Watford Junction. It’s not valid on Virgin Trains, but I don’t think you can validly travel between those two stations on that operator anyway (there’s a set down/pick up arrangement).
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/oyster/using-oyster/where-you-can-use-oyster
@James:
It would be nice if TfL took account of the fact that the former group disproportionately contributes the most in taxes to fund them as well.
TfL doesn’t receive any operating subsidy from government. In fact TfL fares subsidise things like road maintenance as well. And in the case of Crossrail farepayers are going to be paying a big chunk of the capital cost too (via TfL loans that need to be repaid from fare income).
@ Greg – Unless you have been sent a secret copy of the fares proposals for the Reading line I don’t see how you can say that Slough will be in Zone 7. No one outside of TfL, DfT and GWR know what is proposed for that route in terms of fares and any notional concept of zoning. My guess is that once the Oyster system is rejigged to recognise individual stations and associated pricing that all these “special zones” will vanish. It will simply be the case that stations will be listed as being valid destinations for Oyster and Contactless travel and the fares will be buried away in Mayoral Decisions and the Single Fare Finder. I also think that some of the compromises on pricing, such as the Hertford East branch, will go as well once Oyster can price each station individually rather than as a “pseudo zone”.
We know from a recent TfL Board Paper about funding for computer system enhancements that there are several parallel initiatives going on with Oyster to cope with a range of issues. Unfortunately there was little detail in the paper’s appendices but I think we will see a step change in fares system capability but not all of it will be immediately apparent to passengers.
@ PoP – I know you have quoted directly from a TfL statement about the extent of “TfL” fares and concessions on Crossrail but I’m more than a little sceptical. I suspect the Mayor was very keen to get the “good news” out there and it’s partly a useful smokescreen to deflect criticism from the huge fares to / from Heathrow. However the Mayoral Decision itself relates solely to what happens in May 2018. We have multiple further fares revision dates / Crossrail service changes to get through until we get beyond the full Crossrail service in Dec 2019. I’m not relying on anything fares and concession wise, especially out to Reading, until I see it in black and white in a signed Mayoral Decision as that is what TfL will implement. And yes I am being a tad pessimistic and distrusting but there are a lot of fares issues, as pointed out by you and Timbeau, associated with the Reading extension. On top of all of those there are plenty more that arise courtesy of open interchange between Thameslink and Crossrail at Farringdon as well as the Thameslink service patterns that start from May this year. I think (hope?) we may get a set of surprises on fares and ticketing matters towards the end of the year that will smooth the way for Thameslink and Crossrail to deliver a step change in connectivity.
@ Si – I think the reason for that Liv St – Brentwood off peak anomoly is that fares to “London Terminals” keep rising and are outside of the fares freeze because of the agreement TfL are locked into to not create problems for TOC fares. For example TfL had to increase fares as far as Liv St on their local West Anglia lines in Jan 2018. At some point I can see the Liv St fare exceeding the through fare to Zone 1 because of the opposing forces of DfT fares policy vs the Mayor’s fares freeze. It will, of course, be a ludicrous situation but that’s the lunacy we’re locked into for now.
WW
You did notice the “?” in my Slough = Z7 comment? I was not sure that it was the case, but other comments elsewhere, made it seem likely.
However, your description of the comprehensive re-jigging of Oyster, & I had no idea it was that big a project, makes your suggestion a much more likely outcome.
Two lunacies, actually: 1 – The mayor’s so-called “Fares Freeze” & 2 – DfT (Thymallus) fares policy. As you sggest, putting them together, up against each other, only makes things worse.
@Ian Jackson
“In fact TfL fares subsidise things like road maintenance as well.”
That’s a bit of hyperbole to highlight the problem that TfL is the only roads authority in England that doesn’t get a grant for road maintenance from the DfT. Doubly bad because there’s a plan for Highways England to get a cut of road taxes sent directly too them for trunk roads and TfL’s Red Routes have a lot of roads that were trunk roads before being devolved.
Certainly there’s truth in it – if tube fares did actually pay for the true cost of the tube, then TfL’s loss-making activities like maintaining roads would be being subsidised by them. However, even without the current shortfall in fare receipts, TfL fares on the rail-based modes weren’t going to quite cover all the costs (depreciation not being counted for in the idea of ‘operational surplus’) and then there’s the cap-ex of station upgrades to account for too.
There’s also a danger that if they push the idea that the tube makes a profit that then gets spent on TfL’s other jobs too hard, then getting funding off a friendlier government for cap-ex projects on the Tube is going to be difficult.
V. Horrid Thought
Is there a “policy” to slowly bankrupt TfL for purely doctrinare “reasons” so that the failed attempt to sell “London Transport” off & completely break it up ( Ridley, Thatcher ) can be repeated at some not-too-distantly future date?
@me yesterday
“what will happen to the Windsor, Marlow and Henley branches [if/when oyster is extended to Reading]? Would they remain as little isolated Oysterless enclaves, like the Shepperton branch?”
Only just realised that Shepperton is not an isolated instance, although these islands are fewer than they used to be. There are:
Kempton Park to Shepperton (4 stations)
Woldingham to East Grinstead/Uckfield (14 stations)
Tilbury Town/West Horndon to Shoeburyness (15 stations)
Until 2006 we also had:
Banstead and Epsom Downs (2 stations)
Whyteleafe to Caterham (3 stations)
Chipstead to Tattenham Corner (4 stations)
Great Western’s Thames Valley branches have one, four and three stations respectively.
@Greg Tingey – Nothing would surprise me. Worth re-reading “Overgrounded” (and comments…) every so often, if only to appreciate the depths of doctrinaire mismanagement surrounding much UK transport planning. Whilst far from perfect, at least Adonis and McLouglin seemed to have some sort of strategic understanding of the importance of a coherent, joined up network and the wider benefits of effective public transport. Not sure that whoever eventually replaces the current incumbent will be an improvement, but difficult to imagine them being much worse – or doing more damage?
[Very slightly modified for tone. PoP]
@Si
If there’s one thing that the government bean counters know only too well, it’s the difference between capex and opex and how they’re fundamentally different types of spending. Money for suitably worthy capital projects is borrowing (or ‘investment’) rather than subsidy. “Suitably worthy” means the project is capable of paying for itself plus interest, generally because it creates something identifiable as an “asset”.
When you talk about “the true cost” of the tube, presumably you mean repaying the capital outlay of construction plus major upgrades as well as operating expenditure? This is all a bit hypothetical since Yerkes’ debts and many successive project debts are long written off!
Whilst fares income may never have paid for the tube alone, in the case of transport infrastructure projects, especially road projects in fact, it can be difficult to determine if a specific asset is paying for itself or not, because the return on investment is wholly or partly economic growth leading to increased tax receipts.. The wider economic impact of the tube and the M25 and other transport infrastructure on London and the UK is undeniable, so whilst the “true cost” may never be covered by fares alone, it has been covered many times over by the additional tax receipts generated.
In short, no government is going to deny capital funding for worthy infrastructure projects based on some sort of operating surplus being generated; I know politicians are stupid, but the civil servant bean counters are not. A government denying capital funding for genuinely worthy infrastructure projects is doing so purely for political reasons and any other reason given is just a convenient excuse (which would simply be replaced a different excuse were it not available).
Anonymous,
Not disputing basic premise at all. I like to think of it as ‘genuine investment’ that stays around and operating costs for which there is nothing permanent to show for them.
Of course, this is a bit of an artificial distinction. Tendering a bus service produces no long term assets. Buying a bus does – but is it really worth that much? In any case it’s value reduces to little more than zero fourteen years later. Similarly leasing trains and buying them (substitute 40 for 14).
Where it really falls down is something like purchase of a train fleet. Do you buy sufficient trains so that maintenance can be done during the day Monday-Friday thus minimising operating expenditure or do you do maintenance during the night and at weekends which minimises capital expenditure? The obvious danger is that the government approves the first (capex good, opex bad) whereas the second option may well have been more cost-effective in the lifetime of the fleet. The less obvious danger is that the government is paranoid about not over-ordering in case assets do not get fully utilised so forces the second option even when it may be the bad option. Then, worse still, everyone realises that there is no slack in the system and, actually, they don’t have enough trains and ordering a small batch to make up the numbers is going to be very expensive indeed and add to maintenance costs if the new trains are in any way different from the original fleet.
@Anon
“A government denying capital funding for genuinely worthy infrastructure projects is doing so purely for political reasons ”
Or even delaying capital funding.
Each year the capital expenditure is delayed squanders away a year’s worth of the benefits (reduced costs, increased revenue, less pollution, whatever) that are expected to arise from the project.
Only in exceptional cases might delay allow a reduction in capital costs large enough to offset the sunk cost of delay. (Examples might be because equipment or personnel from another project can be redeployed on the new one, or if the daily cost to business-as-usual of two projects running in parallel is more than twice as disruptive than if they were to run consecutively).
It is irrelevant that money may need to be borrowed to finance the project – the sooner you borrow the money, the sooner the project can be started, the sooner the project will be completed, and the sooner you can start to pay back the loan. And unlike people or private companies, governments can always borrow money.
Not sure I agree with all of it, but this paper: “How to value infrastructure” from the Institute for Government makes quite interesting reading on deficiencies in CBA/BCR methodology on rail investment criteria.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/IfG%20Report%20CBA%20infrastructure%20%5Bweb%20final%5D.pdf
timbeau,
In general, very true. The possible exception is when you want to delay a new purchase because the technology is rapidly evolving and, if you can delay a decision, the final product will be better or cheaper or both.
This may actually be the case with new trains. With the advances in telematics we are getting to an era of predictive maintenance and dreams of a substantial improvement of Mean Time Between Failure figures. The fact that train suppliers are encountering a lot of problems now could actually be evidence for this. And it might make sense to hold back until someone else has sorted out the bugs encountered with this new way of thinking.
@PoP
Indeed so, – spending the money needed to keep old trains running rather than on being a guinea pig for the new ones can be a good plan. But in that case you are also deferring the cost of replacing the new ones in 30 or 40 years time. One should, surely, consider replacement of assets with a finite life, such as trains, to be a running cost, whereas a new railway or road is usually a one-off capital cost (Forth Road Bridge possibly excepted!)
An additional comment to the issue raised by TheMurkyDepths – the fare anomoly raised by different route options from Abbey Wood to Faringdon. Priced at tfl rate or through rail & tfl rate? How can the system tell?
The same issue will arise at Greenwich (which shares a common gateline between DLR and national rail), albeit it’s the revised Thameslink services rather than Crossrail in this case.
@Timbeau – “… One should, surely, consider replacement of assets with a finite life, such as trains, to be a running cost…”
Sort of… In most commercial budgets this would form the Depreciation element of the financial reporting, with the Asset useful lifetime and current net book value agreed with the internal finance team and auditors. Unwise to suggest that this leaves ample scope to make the accounts look as good (or bad) as required by playing tunes with the projected asset lifetime as year end approaches…!
@ Greg 1220 – Being careful to avoid the mods’ axe I think what we have are two intensely political figures in Khan and Grayling. They are both schemers and campaigners in their respective parties. There is also the much rumoured mutual dislike when they opposed each other on Justice matters in the Commons. I think what we are seeing on transport issues is a “power play” with the unfortunate aspect that the Secretary of Stage will always have more power. The fact that the travelling public are the likely collateral damage in all of this seems not to influence either protagonist.
@PoP @timbeau
A capitalisable asset doesn’t need to be permanent! Technically it’s anything which has fiscal value for a period beyond the accounting period of its purchase. In practice this generally means buying something that has value for more than a year. You buy a bus, you can use it to carry fare paying passengers for say 10 years. The bus is thus an asset that can be capitalised for 10 years. But when you pay a driver to drive the bus for a day, that doesn’t have any value tomorrow, so it is operational cost (“opex”). So is fuel, cleaning, maintenance, the driver’s manager and so on.
All “capitalised” means is that you recognise the bus has value for 10 years and nominally pay a tenth of the cost of it each year, or 120th of the cost of it each month. If you borrowed the money you also have to pay the finance cost, or interest. If you take enough fares to cover all of that, plus the opex costs, and make a surplus (i.e. a profit) it was a good investment and everyone will be happy. The money lender (“investor”) will be happy, the driver and other staff will get paid and be happy.
If you get it wrong, and you capitalised something that didn’t have value for the length of the capitalisation, you need to “write down” or “write off” the asset which is to pay (on paper at least) the remaining amount in one hit. If you borrowed the money, you either have to find some other way to repay the debt, or you default. If you keep doing this, people stop lending you money or investing in your organisation and ultimately you go bankrupt.
In response to your question about maintenance @PoP, the bean counters can work that out. If a train costs £3m and is captialised for 30 years, it costs about £2k a week plus interest, say £2.5k a week. Does buying it save £2.5k a week in doing maintenance during the day rather than the night? £2.5k a week might buy, say, 2 full time maintenance engineers. So if you can hire 2 less engineers by doing daytime maintenance the extra train pays for itself. Or maybe all the overtime and night pay for a team of engineers costs £2.5k a week – either way, the maths will be clear, and I can promise it will all be done by the bean counters every time. They may though get it totally wrong, and underestimate or overestimate the amount of maintenance needed, often because they didn’t bother asking any actual engineers about it and just made up a number, but they will be doing these sums.
(and before any accountants chip in, I do realise that the real world versions of the above examples would involve inflation, “net present value” and so on, but I think the simplified version makes the fundamentals clear)
@Anon
“This is all a bit hypothetical since Yerkes’ debts and many successive project debts are long written off!”
I wasn’t thinking construction costs from 100 years ago (or even the ongoing NLX construction), but upgrade work going on to have a network that can deal with the number of customers it has.
TfL’s 2017/18 budget’s Underground section allocated £323m for capital renewals (eg step free-access) and £753m of new capital investment (eg NLX, 4-lines modernisation). Even if you ignore the capital investment, and the £700m depreciation – the £68m forecast net operating surplus isn’t going to cover the renewals works: there’s over £250m additonal money needed from loans and taxes.
@si
Er yes you’re right, operating surplus doesn’t cover the upfront capex investment. It’s never meant to, that’s the whole point of capex!
Ideally operating surplus covers the subsequent depreciation, but most transport infrastructure projects seem to be costed on the basis that the project leads to additional economic growth resulting in additional tax receipts which cover the depreciation (and thus the repayment of any borrowing). Past experience suggests that most rail projects do so many times over, particularly over their very long lifespan.
In the case of tube capacity upgrades, there is known to be repressed demand on much of the tube network at peak times – from past experience the new capacity will fill up, probably almost immediately. This means more fare income, but also more economic growth and more tax receipts from people who wouldn’t otherwise have done that job or had that meeting and done that deal or bought that thing. So chances are the upgrades will easily pay for themselves in 30 or 50 years. That’s the point.
If an asset has a finite working life then depreciation should be taken into account on the balance sheet, whether you are actually saving up for its replacement or expect to borrow the money when the time comes.
If the assets are leased, the leasing costs appear as operating expenditure.
There seems to be an amazing lack of understanding here as to how business cases work.
1) -sooner is not necessarily better: in a lossmaking industry, the longer a capital purchase can be deferred the better; the trade off is then between any additional running costs and the discounted capex.
2) In the public sector, leases are capitalised
3) “Most” public expenditure capital investment has both a financial and economic assessment; it has to pass both tests. Some has no economic test – most railway investment, for example, where the criterion is the least financially expensive.
4) Asset lives and the distinction between capex and opex is very thoroughly standardised in the GAAP and AIA handbooks. That practice is followed through into public sector accounting.
@GH
Accountants must have a very strange view of the world!
Surely your first point is rarely, if ever, relevant in public spending? A project is only loss making if costs exceed benefits, and if that is the case even when social factors are taken into account then the project should not go ahead anyway?
And what is the point of a lease if the cost is capitalized anyway?
Au contraire, a project is lossmaking if it fails to cover its costs. A lossmaking project can generate all the socioeconomic benefits you like but it will still make a financial loss.To take the example of the railways in state ownership. They made a loss every year; their only obligation was to run about 114 m train miles a year and we were obliged to find the cheapest way of delivering that. Investment appraisals included no element of CBA at all. if on the other hand, we were considering a profitable public enterprise (eg BA in those days) equally, the sole criterion of investment was whether it added to the profit – no different to the private sector, in fact. There were plenty of BR schemes with good socioeconomic benefits which were never allowed off the drawing board (eg restoration of services over the WLE).
The point of scoring a lease as public expenditure in the public sector is that so far as the management of the economy is concerned, it involves the consumption of capital expenditure. The point of having that lease as a lease is that it smooths the cash flow (and may have tax advantages).
There is a world of difference between (a) a business case, (b) a funding case, and (c) a socioeconomic case.
@ Timbeau – I can assure you, as a former “client” in LT, that Mr Hewett’s number 1 example was pertinent and applicable all the time. Why on earth do you think LU ended up with such an enormous backlog of worn out assets? Because the sheer expense of replacement / renewal was so high relative to funding that “patch and mend” or “operate at lower capability” was the only way forward. That’s why escalators were failing all the time, why lifts were out of service for months, why power cables burst into flames and why the railway was riddled with speed restrictions / wet beds etc. I worked through more than one capital spending round where you submitted your “ideal” spend profile which was then dumped in the bin and you were told to come up with 20%, 50%. 70% and 80% spending reduction options. Far too many times we got the 80% cut level of spending. People did all the requisite business case work and optioneering but the lack of money forced the “make do and mend” decision in far too many cases.
I was client for ticketing systems and we struggled to get any meaningful work done for many years because, rightly, it was considered more important to have safe tracks, signals and rolling stock. However there came a point where it was eventually realised that spending some money on financially positive schemes, like ticket gates at the highest fraud locations, made sense as it provided more money “in the till” for other investment. LT was forever forced into ridiculously suboptimal decision making because budgets were constrained and not guaranteed for more than a year. You simply can’t get big programmes done that address genuine and substantive needs unless you have the money allocated for several years. I am sure BR had their own special version of this.
For all the moans about PPP that did at least give some sort of breathing space to change how things were done, to deliver upgrades and to plan asset replacement (like track and civil assets) properly at a reasonable cost because you could procure materials and staff sensibly and invest in new technology to do work at lower cost/ faster. We are now back at the annual funding process and you can see all too readily how vulnerable the railway and tube is to that. I know in theory the main line still has control periods but the removal of upgrades from the process renders it all rather meaningless as DfT will decide what’s done not NR or ORR.
@Graham H/ WW
I understand completely that a lossmaking project can nevertheless generate socioeconomic benefits – I would hope that any lossmaking project which did not benefit society or the wider economy would never get the go-ahead. What I am suggesting is that deferring expenditure on such projects has a (socioeconomic) cost that should not be ignored, but all too often is.
If a have an unreliable freezer, or a leaky roof, I can replace it now, or I can defer that cost until later. The capital cost will be the same whenever I do it. But if I do it now, I don’t have to cope with the expensive consequences in the meantime such as replacing ruined food, carpets, etc from time to time. So if the money is available now (or can be borrowed at a rate favourable compared with those extra running costs) delaying is a false economy.
Unlike private enterprise or individuals, the Government can always fund things if it chooses to, as it controls the money supply. There are, of course, socioeconomic consequences of injecting too much money into the economy.
Just to throw in an extra complication to this “deferring” discussion. Certain things (like computers) are steadily and quite rapidly becoming better value due to rapid technical advances. So by deferring spend, you can often spend less or get more for the same cost. To certain other capital goods (e.g. drains) the same does not apply.
Of course, which category trains and stations belong in can be debated.
When it comes to software and computing, the distinction between capital and operational expenditure is often tricky because increasingly most of the costs are variable and recurring (eg hosting or engineer salaries) rather than one-offs.
So for instance a new ticketing system developed in-house might require £10m a year for an initial development period, and then between £4-8m a year after that (with the amount difficult to predict as future requirements and developments are unknown).
Very difficult to account for as future value (eg being able to license it to others) and other positive externalities (eg improved customer experience leading to increased revenue) is purely guesswork.
Timbeau writes: “Unlike private enterprise or individuals, the Government can always fund things if it chooses to, as it controls the money supply”
Um…where to begin explaining why this is, I am afraid, not actually true. Perhaps the best way to think of this is the government/society can allocate all the economic resources in the economy to various things (e.g. investment, consumer items, workers-hours, leisure-time, transport, etc.). But there is only a certain amount of these items in the economy. If the government/society wants more economic resources given to the railway then it has to take something away from something else. Or persuade foreigners to forgo some of this stuff in their country so we can have more (usually by promising to give them stuff in the future, which we hope they will believe).
@timbeau -unless and until you are happy to paid in “funny money” rather than cash , no matter how good the benefits of any scheme might be, the limitation will always be whether can it be afforded. At the risk of sounding like a certain PM in the ’80s (Heaven forfend), in your domestic life, you wouldn’t buy that comfy new sofa until you could afford it; so too with trains.
One of the major headaches, especially in the field of transport, is valuing socioeconomic benefits and then, secondly, trying to persuade someone to buy them. Books have been written on the subject but I might add that the closest any transport operator has got to doing this is LT/TfL; the pdfh doesn’t come close, alas.
BTW an extreme attempt to do what you suggest – and one which was always going to be a spectacular failure, for the reasons Aneconspeaks, was the soviet union’s Gosplan. Si monumentum requiris, and all that.
@Aneconspeaks
Indeed, funding is only one of the resources needed to carry out a project. All the money in the world won’t get a project done faster if the only people with the skills to do it are busy on another project.
@GH – of course you shouldn’t buy things you can’t afford (yet) – although many people do: furniture – and even things which last a lot less time, like holidays – can be bought on credit. But my point was that there is an irrecoverable cost in putting off capital investment, as for every year you put it off, you lose the benefit of the project for that year. And you won’t get that money back when you eventually do get round to it.
(I am of course only talking about genuinely capital projects intended to last in perpetuity: renewals are different of course – the sooner you replace something, the sooner the replacement will itself need replacing)
@Graham H: happy to paid in “funny money” rather than cash
I’m not sure exactly what the distinction is, in the post-Gold Standard world of fiat currency.
@Greg T: Is there a “policy” to slowly bankrupt TfL for purely doctrinare “reasons”
I doubt it. Right now the Treasury have exactly what they would want: a London transport network that benefits the economy but costs them very little. Why would they want to end up having to bail out a bankrupt TfL? Even if motivated by a desire for privatisation, remember that most of TfL’s services are privately operated already (and unlike with National Rail services, there seems to be no particular public desire to renationalise them).
@timbeau – it’s very simple: by deferring a capital item you defer its cost but you *may* incur extra costs (for example additional maintenance costs ) keeping the old asset in service. It’s a trade off that every business faces. And there are plenty of techniques for enabling you to make that comparison, noteably discounted cash flow.
You can also,of course, produce a socio-economic appraisal in which you try and value the benefits of – in the illustrative case – the benefits to you of being able to sit on a new sofa sooner,and you use money as a common appraisal currency. That would give you a guide as to how much actual cash it was worth spending on a new sofa. But – if you haven’t got the cash, no new sofa.
Then there is the funding case – is it better to borrow or wait until the piggy bank is full?
Bluntly, you can have the most attractive socio-economic case, but if you haven’t got the pelf,tough.
@Ian Jackson – I’m afraid you haven’t got the joke. “Funny money” is Whitehall slang for socio-economic benefits, nothing to do with the difference between a paper currency and one back by gold/cowrie shells or whatever. To make my point again more banally.until you can persuade people to be paid in socio-economic benefits, you have little choice but to run the economy on cash. [Of course, you can try and run a command economy,Gosplan style, in which people are handed goods and services when the plan decides, but that didn’t end well, did it?]
@ WALTHAMSTOW WRITER
“different fare scale applies to journeys on the … West Anglia lines.”
Thanks for the information. I’ve been checking it out and it does indeed say this in a place the public can see, I have found this in the small print of
https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/fares-freeze
“separate fares apply for journeys that include travel on London Overground: between Liverpool Street and Enfield Town, Cheshunt, Chingford and Emerson Park and all intermediate stations; between Shadwell and New Cross, Crystal Palace and West Croydon and all intermediate stations.”
@SI 18 March 2018 at 18:57
Thanks for the details. I’ve been using the Single Fare Finder API for a client, so I have been able to compile my own comparison tables for the off-peak TfL Rail fares.
https://ukfree.tv/styles/images/2018/tfl_off_peak.PNG
I have made enquires with my contacts as to why this off-peak only anomaly exists.
@ Briantist – all you had to do was look at the fares revision articles that I write for LR each year. I believe I always provide a link to the relevant Mayoral Decision (MD) paper. Those MD papers set out in reasonable detail what fares change and explain why.
[Moderator’s note: Briantist makes some valid points in this message, but some of them could be construed as somehow “getting at” WW. I trust that was not B’s intention, but rather than attempting to adjust the wording, I am letting the message stand unchanged. Readers should construe the message as objecting to the actions of TfL and/or the mayor. WW’s only role in the matter is to have reported on these anomalies; I don’t think he has ever sought to defend them (though he may, quite reasonably, be in a position to understand the origin of at least some of them, and perhaps to help our understanding of them).
As a more general comment, addressed not to Briantist but to everyone, would people please try to word things in a more impersonal way, to avoid unnecessary interpersonal hassle. Malcolm]
@WALTHAMSTOW WRITER
I see… Is that what a “reasonable person” is to do?
Perhaps it would be better to show “Special Fares Apply” on the main Tube Map for those lines that have unusual fares, rather than make out they are in the main charging zone.
It does seem rather misleading to show these zones to the public if they “don’t really count”?
I get it that you sometimes get charged via Zone 1 and sometime not rather randomly (Hoxton to Straford vs Hoxton to Stratford International DLR) because of some unfathomable logic.
But … having different fares without saying so, sucks, especially on the Overground. How are “normal people” to trust the system, if they can’t see the system?
@Graham H: Of course, you can try and run a command economy, Gosplan style, in which people are handed goods and services when the plan decides, but that didn’t end well, did it?
Given the DfT’s control freaky shenanigans while trying to make it look like there is a private company in control, I thought we were living in a command economy, but just lacking a plan!
@SHLR 🙂 Many of we former inhabitants of that antheap have long thought that.
@Graham H
“until you can persuade people to be paid in socio-economic benefits, you have little choice but to run the economy on cash.”
Most people are persuaded of the principle (if not the level) of socio-economic benefits being provided by the government in lieu of a percentage of their gross pay. (20% for a basic-rate taxpayer).
Many capital projects have no cash return at all, or may increase costs and only be revenue-neutral – for example recent programmes to extend platforms to take longer trains have resulted in the operator having to lease and maintain more carriages. With regulated fares and a captive market, the only benefits are intangible ones like greater passenger comfort or safety. But such projects nevertheless get authorised.
The government does in effect have a magic money tree (two actually, the Royal Mint for coins and the Bank of England for notes) but it has to use them wisely. If Gosplan isn’t a good idea, nor is hyperinflation.
@SHLR
It’s not so much a command economy but a cherry picking economy – get on and do what you like but we reserve the right to interfere in whatever details we want to, whenever we want, without notice.
@timbeau – I thought I had explained the point clearly. There are a number of circumstances,of which the railways are one (the legal system and the NHS are others, for example), where the benefits are unappraised; the requirement is to deliver whatever the stated output is supposed to be, as cheaply as possible. In the case of the railways, it was,as I say, 114 m train miles pa. Many investments (eg the replacement of the 11x fleet of dmus,did indeed have a negative cash flow, but the number was still smaller than the non-replacement scenario. So the taxpayers saved money.
I am well aware of the “social wage” argument. Try hiring contractors someone to do a piece of work and tell them you will pay less than the going rate because you know they are receiving state benefits.
@Quinlet -and it’s that that leaves some more thoughtful commentators concerned that it would be difficult to justify the selection of cherrypicked items and therefore the implied public expenditure. Either they are justifiable in CBA terms or they are not. In the former case, they they would form part of a standard , ranked selection of items; in the latter, they wouldn’t appear at all. As it is, we see from the negotiations with franchise bidders a seemingly random selection of cherries to clinch the deal – sometimes it’s wifi, sometimes it’s station refurb, sometimes it’s extra trains. These are hardly interchangeable in valuation terms. One’s concern is heightened by failure of the pdfh to provide any sort of valuation methodology for many of these items at all.
@Malcolm
@WW
My apologies that I didn’t make it clear who I thought was being .. unclear.
TfL says,,,
“Please find response for Single Fares Finder Team:
Most off-peak adult pay as you go fares for journeys on London Underground within Zones 2-6 are £1.50, but different fares apply for some journeys on TfL Rail and for LU journeys beyond Zone 6. These fares are correctly shown on the Single Fare Finder and in the API data. The Fares Freeze link does not refer to fares on TfL Rail services or to fares not including Zone 1”
Is “different fares apply for some journeys” Kafkaesque to just me?
How is a non-gender specific person on a unspecified mode of transport in Clapham supposed to know from the publicity (say, Tube Map and in-train diagrams) that all Zones are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Briantist: A good question. But, as others have said better than me, Oysterzone fares are extremely complex. Probably mainly for historical reasons. Most people (and I include myself) understand the zones, but know that zones can only be an approximate guide to single fares. It’s not limited to the explicit differences we started with – see this page for one expert interpretation.
Your non-expert Clapham person is not expected to understand all this. They are expected to trust the single fares finder. You are entitled to a view that this is a bit daft – many people would agree with you. But it is where we are.
It is getting to the point where the zones are only relevant to Travelcard validity.
For single fares, Oyster could be arranged to go back to separate point-to-point fares between each station pair. (Or indeed different fares for different bus routes, or even different boarding points on the same route!)
I think one of the problems TfL has got itself into is the pretense that Oyster single fares are zonal: had they from the start stated that they are ‘point to point’, and that while based in part on the zones, this was merely a starting point for the calculation, supplemented by various assumptions and other rules (regarding routes, etc.) everyone would have accepted that that is how it worked.
The counter-argument is that Oyster single fares /are/ zonal (with time-of-day variations) if you stick to Underground and Overground (*) (and wombling free, if you must). That is quite a big subset of actually made journeys, though of course it is nothing like all of them.
(*) That is, the original big-orange-circle of Overground, not including the various Liv-St and Emerson bits that have recently crept in to dilute the brand. And subject to any other ifs and buts that I have forgotten.
@Malcolm
“That is, the original big-orange-circle of Overground,”
The original Overground network included Watford Junction, which has always had special fares.
Until 1997 there were also three Underground stations outside the zones (five until 1994).
Do we know just how relevant single fares are these days? I know that many people worried about the cash fares for any journey well after the proportion of users paying in cash had reduced almost to an insignificant level. Are single fares still that important?
timbeau: True. But if you consider Watford Junction and the once-zoneless stations as additional zones, the subset I quoted is still a fully-zoned system, where only the zones travelled through (and time of day) determine the fare.
Not important though, I was really only making the point that the totality of Oysterland is neither the fully zoned system which some TfL publicity almost implies, nor the other extreme of a system like the pre-Oyster tube where all o/d pairs have individual fares and zones are travelcard-only concepts. The reality is somewhere between these extremes.
Quinlet: Single fares may be uncommon, and people worrying about them may be even less common. But the parallel with no-cash-on-buses anxiety is not exact. The latter included the concerns like “I might lose my Oyster on a big night out”, “what about tourists and very occasional visitors from Barrow in Furness?” and suchlike. Actual cash transactions may have been rare, but hypothetical ones (in people’s heads) remained widespread.
The further out you go from central London the more single fares matter because the only daily caps assume you are going into zone 1 and back.
I’ve read the various posts and mod comments so understand the context etc. This is a bit of a long reply so forewarned is forearmed.
@ Briantist – my response about the Mayoral Decision papers was in the context of “interested persons” who read London Reconnections. Some of those people may be “reasonable people” with a tiny interest in minutiae. However LR is a technical and detailed site and I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that many readers have a deeper than average interest in transport matters and would perhaps delve around in detail especially if links in relevant articles had been provided. I certainly assumed that you would have done that given you express a detailed interest in many topics on LR. Judging from your reaction I was wrong.
To come to the more general point TfL have clearly decided that the Single Fare Finder is the only place people will sensibly look for fares info and that they will do so on a journey by journey basis. Being someting of a “fares techie” I find that a bit cumbersome but I recognise I am in a tiny minority of preferring to have proper, comprehensive fares tables. The fares finder, though, is the only place that sets out default and alternative routes for charging purposes and advises where you must travel through / validate at to be charged a given fare. I also have a much greater level of detailed knowledge of TfL fares than the average person. Just don’t ask me to explain National Rail ticketing as I lost track of that about 25 years ago and my head spins when I read some of the immense complexity on the NR network when it’s discussed on other forums.
The TfL system is largely zonally based given stations are grouped into zones for charging purposes. In the past we only had one spread of fares – cash ones. When Pay as You Go arrived we got an additional list of discounted “electronic” fares for PAYG that applied to the DLR and Tube. When TfL got its hands on the Overground then PAYG was applied there. However the nature of those initial LO routes brought a load of complexity as multiple fares suddenly existed between origin / destination pairs based on routes. We also got contra-peak charging on the Watford – Euston local line. Then we got fare routing choices using pink validators. In the old days of paper tickets alternative routes and fares did exist and that was printed on the ticket and booking clerks knew the options. Similarly through tickets covering tube and NR (BR) combined journeys also existed and again there were route options. Back in the late 1980s I was part of the team putting that data into LU ticket machines.
When National Rail was added to the smartcard (Oyster) system then that brought in a whole load of extra complexity because of divergent pricing from what applied to then TfL services. That divergence has widened because of recent fares policy decisions but was there from the start. As soon as TfL got its hands on services that paralleled others (Greater Anglia mostly) then it was caught on the hooks of commitments to the DfT. These originated with Crossrail (they’re in the Act authorising the project) so the risk of fare divergence and the need to avoid it were foreseen long ago. This is why you have divergence on some fares for journeys across the same zones but on different services. I won’t even mention the various concessions for various groups which multiply the number of fares for each journey. We have a zonal structure BUT we have multiple tariffs as to what you are charged for journeys. The nearest analogy is with mobile phones where the cost of using telephony and data services can vary by customer on the same network.
I agree it is complex – needlessly so in many cases. I agree the average person would probably struggle – you only need to look at the myriad questions that Mike Whitaker answers on his Oyster Rail site. It would be vastly more sensible to have a unified tariff across all rail modes but there is no political will to achieve this when you have divergent fares policies controlled by politicians from different parties. Given central government will almost always want to put fares up I cannot ever see them conceding that a Mayor of London would have the absolute final say on all rail fares for trips covered by the Oyster network. I should just end by saying that an unified tariff is probably not a panacea either – plenty of German regions have zonal tariffs for their public transport but simple they are not. It gets even more complex when they join / overlap through geography.
There are no simple answers on ticketing matters given the huge issues that sit behind how fares are set. I agree with a previous comment that suggested that point to point fares would probably make more sense presentationally given the complexity of the transport network. I suspect that that is where we are headed with the advent of Crossrail – especially to Reading. Other commenters have laid out a number of issues that could affect Oyster once it has to stretch to Reading. It will be interesting to see what the DfT and TfL have worked on to deal with those issues.
@Graham H: until you can persuade people to be paid in socio-economic benefits, you have little choice but to run the economy on cash. [Of course, you can try and run a command economy,Gosplan style, in which people are handed goods and services when the plan decides, but that didn’t end well, did it?
There are a number of circumstances,of which the railways are one (the legal system and the NHS are others, for example), where the benefits are unappraised; the requirement is to deliver whatever the stated output is supposed to be, as cheaply as possible.
Could you elucidate the difference between “being handed goods and services when the plan decides”, Soviet-style, and, say, the NHS, or the road network? Is your argument simply that things such as labour needed to deliver those services are paid for in cash and not in kind? The Soviet Union paid its workers in cash, too (maybe Mao’s People’s Communes are what you had in mind?), and cash was a constraint on investment (compare the East Berlin and West Berlin U-Bahns).
I agree entirely that you need cash to pay for services and investment, but ultimately the amount of cash available is not a constant: it reflects a political decision about how much to borrow and how much money to create (the latter decision being an arms-reach one by the Bank of England, but still political in that the parameters are set by the government – and the Bank has certainly been creating a lot of money recently). That decision in turn is influenced by the question of what the cash might be spent on (although the decision makers will take care not to let the spending departments have a say).
@WW: The nearest analogy is with mobile phones where the cost of using telephony and data services can vary by customer on the same network
One crucial difference is that mobile networks, like Intercity rail companies, deliberately aim to have customers paying different amounts, so as to maximise their revenue (the aim is to extract as much out of each individual customer as they are prepared to pay). Whereas capping has the effect of minimising revenue – each customer is charged the lowest available fare for their travel (except for various anomalies).
Ian J: the words “minimise” and “maximise” only make sense when you ask what is being minimised and under what constraints. Yes, market segmentation (in mobile networks, car models or anywhere else) is intended to maximise the total take, but if capping is minimising anything, it is the individual payments by travellers, not any kind of total.
A more complex system (like daily-capped PAYG fares) can still be seen as market segmentation, where different passengers pay different amounts for the same journey, so the authority is getting more (per journey) out of passengers making only one journey in a day than they get from those making five. This could still be maximising total revenue, compared to only charging the single-journey maker one fifth of the daily cap (say).
I note lots of discussion about the ever-extending Oyster reach and complexity.
Surely the answer would be a national public transport smartcard ?
I’ll get my coat. I’m sure a national system using our bank cards as the smartcard will be along very soon instead, as promised.
@ Ian J – I take your point but I didn’t spend hours thinking of the perfect comparison. Oyster used to claim to offer the cheapest daily spend but the introduction of fares to Gatwick and the way they’re set blew that promise out of the water. The fares levels are not perfect (were they ever?) and various changes to the capping regime have deliberately removed previous cheaper options precisely to raise the take from rail passengers. That happened under the previous Mayor. I guess you could possibly (note that word) argue that one aim of the fares structure is to try to encourage a reasonable level of off peak usage so that offered capacity is used to acceptable levels. One of the reasons for some of TfL’s funding woes is a reduction in such off peak travel as people’s leisure and shopping activities change as a result of technology enabling new services.
One thing Oyster and Contactless have done is lower a perceived barrier to travel – needing cash in your hand and queuing for a ticket. I’d guess a majority of London residents have one or the other cards available to them so they have access to the transport network. I expect this supports a level of discretionary public transport use that was not there to the same extent under the old cash focussed regime.
WW. I think the perceived barrier to travel point is indeed a big deal.
Electronic payment (oyster etc) also provides much greater flexibility, especially on national rail services. With paper tickets – Gatwick is a good example -,there are trains operating under three different brand names,with some tickets restricted by brand name. (We’ll park the issue that tickets can’t be restricted by a brand name, only by route or legal company). Instead of the sheer frustration of trying to work out which train will arrive next and therefore which variety of ticket is cheapest (did I read that there are over 50 fares between Gatwick and stations in London…?), now I just beep in and jump on any train, knowing that the system will charge me a reasonable fare afterwards.
It’s better than that. If I get a phone call mid journey, telling me I need to change destination, I don’t need to do anything other than change train. With the paper ticket system, I might well have had to go to the ticket office and buy an extension ticket. For the average punter, electronic payment is so much easier.
@Island Dweller
“If I get a phone call mid journey, telling me I need to change destination, I don’t need to do anything other than change train. With the paper ticket system, I might well have had to go to the ticket office and buy an extension ticket. For the average punter, electronic payment is so much easier.”
Unfortuanety, the longer distance companies are pulling in the other direction, pricing flexible tickets so high that more and more people have advance tickets where no change of plan whatsoever is countenanced – later train, break of journey, not even cutting the journey short are permitted. (I’m just waiting for them to start fining no-shows………)
I’m not sure that “cutting the journey short” resulting in an extra fare is actually legal, but that doesn’t stop them from trying …..
Fining short-travellers may not be legal with “normal” tickets, where break of journey is allowed. But if an operator offers special reduced fares (advance tickets, tickets where you must have a child or teddy bear, etc etc) then I believe they can impose what conditions they wish. This problem, and others, arise when the normal ticket has such an eye-watering price that special fancy tickets become the only one normal people can afford.
@Malcolm – leading to the ludicrous situation where people offering teddy bears or surrogate grandparents hang around stations. [The extreme version of this logic is to see in the Hermitage in Petersburg, where groups are given precedence over queuers; so, logically, organisations in the courtyard appear to offer to assemble spot groups….]
@Greg T – there was wellknown case about 20 years ago where the Isle of Man Steam Packet attempted to prosecute people for not using the return half of a discounted ticket. The judge’s remarks, in throwing out the case, were very entertaining. {presumably, the idea was that people in boarding houses in Heysham lived in fear of that 3 am knock from the IOMPS….]
Not using returns. Obviously prosecution is the wrong tool for enforcing that sort of thing. If they had simply charged the non-discounted fare and offered to refund the difference when you returned at the specified time, they would have achieved their objective.
Just like the large negative tram fare I was charged in Amsterdam, in a car park deal. Could only get the heavily-discounted parking rate by presenting the appropriate number of used tram tickets (with correct timings) between the car park and the centre, in both directions. But I had to have the full parking rate blocked on my credit card at the outset, so no prosecution nonsense.
Come to think, the “charge now, refund later” approach is exactly what Oyster and contactless does in many such situations. Which brings us back accidentally, if not to “on topic”, at least to an earlier digression…
I don’t think there has been reference to “freedom pass on Elizabeth line – Request ID: FOI-2655-1718 – published: 20 March 2018” which confirms availability on all services to December 2019, with Reading line still to be considered before it opens. The Boroughs have to decide what they will finance.
In the golden age of cross-Channel booze cruises not using returns was rife. There were any number of ‘car load for a fiver’ offers in the papers and they never checked whether you came back, or indeed used the outward prtion on the way back. We often made a weekend of it for £10 return. I’m sure some used the offers for entire holidays.
They got wise to it in the end, the advent of computerized ticketing systems no doubt helped.
@NickD – there are many of these sorts of nonsenses, and with a certain amount of low cunning,they can be often worked around. [My personal favourite related to a job I did which required me to visit Joburg a number of times; the London-Joburg return fare was about £300 more than the Joburg-London fare, so we simply booked one return from the London end, used at the beginning and end of the job, and the rest were the other way round booked from our Joburg office…]
Hello everyone,
Just to double check something with you: Since the Crossrail will be up and running as of May, does it mean that the currently operating Heathrow Connect service will stop running from Paddington? Or will there be a temporary period while this will be still in place?
Just asking as we, Heathrow employees currently “enjoy” a discounted pass on the Heathrow Connect trains between Reading/Paddington and LHR and not sure if this discounted pass (75% OFF) will be also offered also on the new Crossrail as part of TFL?
Has anyone got any news on this whether Heathrow and TFL hold maybe any discussions on this topic as this obviously affects a huge amount of airport workers and the new ticketing system (especially for those travelling from Zone 1 to the airport) will be a massive price increase in transport fares?
Any update on this would be appreciated.
@Airliner 767
As far as I am aware all that is happening in May is that the Heathrow Connect services from Paddington (upstairs) will be operated by TfL Rail. Services through the core will not start until December, and even then will go no further west than Paddington (downstairs). It will be another year after that before there will be direct trains from Heathrow to anywhere east of Paddington.
@TAZ
The boroughs have no choice in the matter. They are legally obliged to offer the same concession on all TfL rail services (underground, DLR, overground and anything else) In today’s world that means free travel for Freedom Pass holders.
@ Airliner 767 – TfL and Heathrow are in discussions over continuing an employees discounted scheme. This is specifically stated in the Mayor’s Decision about fares to the airport on TfL Rail come May 2018. Have a read of the pdf document at the end of this webpage.
https://www.london.gov.uk/decisions/md2245-heathrow-airport-rail-fares-20-may-2018
As to what the scheme will be I cannot say – the only info I’ve seen is in the pdf I’ve linked to. If I was an affected employee I would be looking to Heathrow Airport to confirm the status and nature of the future scheme.
Note that TfL take over operation of Heathrow Connect and it will be rebranded as TfL Rail from May. It will run every 30 mins initially but at some point TfL will increase the frequency to every 15 mins. There are some signalling issues that need resolution so TfL have implemented a contingency plan to use the existing Connect trains to the Airport until they introduce their new Crossrail trains on the service and then they can run a more frequent service. In the short term the 2 extra trains an hour will turn round at Hayes and Harlington.
Hope that helps.
@ Airliner 767
Here’s a handy print-out and keep guide to the TfL Rail to Elizabeth Line dates.
https://ukfree.tv/styles/images/2018/TfL_Rail_takeover_of_other_services_diagram.png
(Not hosted on Google drive as that was problematic for some…)
Hello everyone – thanks for the useful input on this, in the meantime found an up-to-date info on this:
https://www.heathrow.com/company/heathrow-jobs/commuting-to-heathrow
Thanks for the replies.
On reflection, I think that I am wearing several hats here.
One hat is the TfL user who lives in Zone 2/3 and works from home, so makes up a large part of his travel using the £1.50 off-peak journeys. That £1.50 can be two bus rides, travel to the far reaches of the DLR or anywhere you can get to outside Zone 1 without going there. It’s quite interesting that it takes a fifth journey to reach the (all day) Z1-2 cap of £6.80.
Another part of this is finding it interesting that when the Zones were introduced, and I lived near Highgate station and came into Zone 1, buying a monthly travelcard was a mathematically simple choice: it was clearly cheaper to buy a Zone 1, 2 and 3A pass. It could be used to (actually) hop on and off buses along Oxford street.
With this hat on I also recall the posters on the Underground inviting travel on the DLR because you could use your Travelcard.
Another hat is a bit of a geographical nerd who spends his time working with enough data that I can see that the whole Zones thing is a bit of an unfair system if it supposed to be a proxy for the distance travelled. It clearly isn’t fair for the Northern line stations that are close to central London but outside the highly uncircular Circle line.
https://ukfree.tv/styles/images/2018/Zone_Distances.jpg
But I just note this with interest, as there are far too many vested interest in these strange zones to change them to make them in some way “fair”.
A third hat is the programmer who doesn’t really like being told over and over again to just use the API to get the price and otherwise go away. I guess that it seems very old-fashioned to have such a non-transparent system. I’m used to my public bodies overflowing with helpful information. Ofcom, for example, is utterly verbose in their output.
I have asked the TfL API people for the API to provide more details to the end-user to answer questions about how the charges are based. Mike Whitaker (from Oyster Rail) has also supported me in that, so perhaps it might happen.
With my programming hat on I’m deeply uncomfortable to just be told “we won’t tell you the logic of this pricing decision”, it seems to not reflect the usual air of Open Government that one expects from Transport for London.
This said, I think the suggestion that it might be better to drop the Zones for single fares and base them on distance travelled, with a peak-time anti-congestion charge might be better. The only missing factor from that might be a time-is-money fast-train charge.
@A767 – From the document you linked to:
…Heathrow colleagues will continue to save up to 75% off the new service on a weekly, monthly or annual basis UNTIL THE END OF NEXT YEAR….
(my capitalisation).
Looks like discussion is ongoing!
@Quinlet
Taz would appear to be correct. Section 240 of the Greater London Act 1999 which governs travel concessions is liberally sprinkled with the word “may” – meaning that they have the power to do so, but no absolute duty to implement anything.
Specifically, there are three geographic categories:
(a)between places in Greater London;
(b)between such places and places outside but in the vicinity of Greater London; or
(c)between places outside but in the vicinity of Greater London.
So Elizabeth Line usage *can* legally be limited: there must be a strong chance that any concession does not extend west of Slough, which is already reached by other TfL services (i.e. the 81 bus). Such an arrangement also neatly sidesteps the Reading fast train issue.
@Man of Kent
The pertinent sections of the Act are s.242, which defines the London Local Transport Network, upon which concessions *must* be provided and includes, as a specific item, ‘railway services’ provided by TfL; and s.243 which requires that the same concession *must* be provided on each different type of service, of which ‘railway services’ is one. Failure by the London boroughs (or London Councils which performs the role on behalf of the boroughs) to provide the same concession on all TfL rail services would mean that the Freedom Pass scheme did not pass the tests for scope and uniformity as set out in ss242 and 243 of the Act and require TfL to initiate the statutory reserve scheme. There’s no ‘may’ or ‘could’ about it when you go into the detail.
@ Briantist – you say you want to know the “logic” that TfL use in setting fare levels? What do you expect them to tell you? Fares are and have been a political decision for decades. All LT / TfL do is respond to the controlling fare policy set by Govt in the past and the Mayor now (with the exception of Travelcards and Caps which are set in conjunction with TOCs who are answerable to the DfT). Fares under Ken Livingstone were changed for a wide variety of reasons. Old TfL Board papers that instructed a variety of fares changes and the introduction of numerous concessions set out the *political* reasoning.
Unfortunately these papers were withdrawn from publication after a few years so the rationale disappeared from view. We set to see the Mayoral Decision papers but these tend to give only a few details about specifics but decisions, such as the year on year increases under Boris Johnson, were part of a deliberate decision to increase user contributions to TfL’s income and control subsidy levels. We now know this was part of a wider agreement with government to make TfL “self sustaining”. I’m not sure what you think you will gain if TfL did somehow explain why they set a Z12 fare at £2.80 off peak or a Z23 fare at £1.70 in the peak. Within the political policy framework these fares are largely at the levels set years ago and simply inflated (or not) by whatever the annual increase has been since 1983. There haven’t been many radical changes to the basis structure of fares for a long time with the exception of having routed fares under Oyster PAYG which gives people cheap fares if they avoid Zone 1 and travel via nominated interchange points.
The TfL API team are not the right people to ask anyway. They have no recourse to the requisite information and official papers. There was a small team of people who set the fares levels in accordance with prevailing policy. I have no idea if that team has survived in the “slimmed down, flatter structured” TfL. I knew the former head of that team – he “invented” the Travelcard back in the early 1980s.
@WW
My recollection of the introduction of the Travelcard – having been involved with the political side of the process in the GLC at the time, was that it was strongly opposed by London Transport, as was, and had to be forced on the by the politicians. Even when the travel card turned out not to be the money loser that had been predicted, there was even stronger opposition from 55 Broadway to the introduction of the one-day travel card without the need for a photo card. I suppose we all remember having been a driving force behind good decisions and, of course, advising against bad decisions.
@ Quinlet – I won’t name the individual I know as it’s not fair on a public site like this. I can well imagine him being “out of step” with the more established LT thinking at the time which was extremely (small c) conservative. I can also understand why there’d be a resistance to non photocard products at the time. After decades and decades of financial woes, cuts and pressure for “efficiency” I can see why there’d be resistance to “new things” that might be subject to fraud. Although in no position of authority at the time I’m sure I’d have been fairly strict in my views about revenue fraud. If it’s your “area” of knowledge and expertise you tend to want to reinforce measures that keep fraud to a minimum.
To be fair and with the benefit of hindsight there were horrendous problems and revenue loss with the reselling of One Day Travelcards by touts in later years. The presence of touts at some stations also acted as a disincentive to travel for some people who didn’t enjoy being hassled to either give up their tickets or to buy what was an “illegal” ticket. It was a dreadful problem at the top end of the Victoria Line and I hated having to trek past aggressive touts while leaving stations. It really took the widespread use of Oyster PAYG and capping to remove the touting problem from the LU network. In that sense those “conservative thinkers” were right to be concerned about possible fraud.
I fully accept your point that the Travelcard product (in its various forms) did a great deal to encourage usage of the system and helped bring in a lot of money over the years. You clearly saw things from a different angle at the time and I only related what was said to me in what I believe was a sincere and honest way. I got no sense of grand-standing or exaggeration in what the person said.
@WW – and not just a problem at the top end of the Victoria Line; Euston was infested with touts, and the more conscientious BR HQ staff took pains, as they passed through, to ensure that the BTP kept an eye on the matter.
@Quinlet
Except that within section 242 is sub-section (5) that allows for restrictions on the London Local Transport Network: “Subsection (1)(a) above does]not preclude the imposition of terms, limitations or conditions with respect to the particular journeys falling within subsection (2) above on which travel concessions are available.”
@ Man of Kent
s.242 refers to the scope of the concessions in terms of charges and availability. Sub-section 5 allows for concessions to be other than free travel, such as half fare, and allows for morning peak hour exclusions, for example. The key section as far as trains to Reading and Heathrow are concerned is in s.243, the requirement for uniformity, specifically s.243(3). This requirement would not be met if some TfL rail service routes (eg Hayes & Harlington to Reading) were excluded from Freedom Pass eligibility.
I have a question related to fares but not strictly just Crossrail-related, sorry to go slightly off-topic but I’m sure the commentariat here will be able to answer.
Yesterday at Oxford Circus tube I saw a large billboard for TfL encouraging people to use contactless and that it was potentially cheaper than a 7-day travelcard. Are TfL being completely altruistic and trying to save people money, or is it that TfL get more of the money from the use of contactless? Does contactless payment effectively work as lots of single fares with a discount applied later?
Transport for London have got the single fare commuter exactly where they want them thanks to technology.
Most people just want to get on their mode of transport in the easiest way possible.
I can use my debit card and not need to worry about topping up at a station to delay my journey.
Why publicise the fares? TfL know that not many care how much they are when the vast majority of single fare transactions now use contactless; people just want to get to their destination, not look up how much it costs. .
And my £1.70 fare in peak from Leytonstone High Road to upper Holloway on Overground is an absolute bargain but don’t tell anyone else that, thank you. 🙂
The individual fares are the same, but multiple fares are calculated better. Potentially cheaper can mean a seven day week starting any day, whereas Oyster is, for now, limited to a Mon-Sun week.
Herned,
Are TfL being completely altruistic and trying to save people money, or is it that TfL get more of the money from the use of contactless?
Sort of. If you use Oystercard then TfL is lumbered with the administration of issuing the card, combatting fraud, sorting out cards that don’t work, get lost etc. And the attitude in the past is that they would leaving banking issues to the banks where possible.
They know that Oyster won’t go away. For one thing, not everyone has a bank account and there are still the Zip cards for the youngsters and 60+ etc for the oldsters. But, as Peter Hendy remarked when commissioner, other public transport organisations are trying to more to an Oyster-like system whilst TfL is trying to move away from it.
@ Herned – there is a simple explanation. TfL fares have been frozen for a couple of years. The Hopper fare can now provide some very cheap trips on buses and trams / discounted bus fares one side of a rail journey (completed within 60 mins). However daily, weekly and monthly Travelcard prices and daily (Oyster and Contactless) / 7 day caps (on Contactless only) have kept rising because the pricing has to reflect increasing rail fares that are under DfT final control. If you only make regular commuting journeys 5 days a week using only TfL priced services then it is now likely that your weekly total will be less than the Travelcard / Bus & Tram Pass prices. Therefore TfL are alerting people to basically check their daily travel costs and summate them to see if they would pay less than a Travelcard or Pass.
In my view it is nothing much to do with what has been said by others. It is basic mathematics because there is a divergence between single fare pricing and season ticket pricing. The Hopper ticket has undermined the Bus and Tram Pass. The continued rise in Travelcard prices / multi modal daily caps affects other modes. I believe TfL are advertising the issue because of political commitments made by the Mayor in response to repeated questions from Assembly Members about divergence in prices. Therefore no one is being exactly atruistic – it’s a politically driven issue to try to avoid people being unduly “ripped off” (my term) and to try to ensure TfL’s reputation is not damaged by being perceived as “sneaky” or “underhand”.
@ Toby – I am afraid you are incorrect. The Contactless 7 day cap works Monday to Sunday only. It cannot start and end on other days. However Oyster, if you choose to buy a Travelcard season, can start on any day you like *but* that does require people to have thought in advance what their travel will be. Even when Oyster gets 7 day capping at the end of this year / early next I fully expect it to be a Monday to Sunday only facility. In short it won’t be useful for those who have non traditional commuting / work patterns that straddle a weekend but with days off during the week.
I take the comments others have made about relative cost efficiency of contactless vs Oyster and that’s fair enough but it’s not my reading of the specific point Herned asked. It is also worth noting that legal action / claims against the banks are ongoing in respect of processing charges (Multi Lateral Interchange Fees) for use of bank cards (not just a TfL thing as other organisations are also aggrieved in the UK and elsewhere) so contactless may not be as “cheap” as TfL had hoped.
What all of this does show is that fares policy decisions have not been considered properly IMO. We have pricing / freezes etc all going off in different directions with an increasingly complex and unsatisfactory situation this not easy to comprehend even if you follow this stuff in detail. How the average passenger is supposed to cope I know not.
Walthamstow Writer,
Point taken about weekly caps which I had overlooked. But this issue will disappear when pay-as-you-go Oyster becomes a pseudo-bankcard later this year and I bet you will still see a move towards non-Oyster contactless.
There are also currently exceptional cases where non-Oyster contactless multiple journeys on the same day can end up being cheaper than Oyster due to the ability to retrospectively decide what the cheapest option would have been.
@ PoP – I fear we may be slightly at cross purposes. For as long as TfL fares are frozen but the DfT keep raising rail fares and forcing Travelcard prices / caps unwards then the greater the number of people who may face a dilemma as to what represents best value for money between PAYG and a season ticket purchase.
While I can see why some people find contactless easy to use and convenient by removing machine transactions I would still argue that a reasonable proportion of people prefer to use Oyster as a separate product that they can manage their costs against. As you said in an earlier post not everyone has access to a bank account or a plastic card linked to an account. You might be right about the continued take up of contactless – it’s bound to increase to some extent when Crossrail / TfL Rail start serving stations without this facility over the next 20 months. Its popularity may keep growing for the usual reasons but I think Oyster will remain popular.
I am now less certain as to how “updated Oyster” will work as the transition happens this year. You may have “inside info” about the modified system that I do not but the range of TfL projects possibly affecting Oyster / fares system has cast some doubt in my mind. I’d love to have a detailed explanation of the planned changes but I can’t see TfL picking the phone up to me! Thinking laterally I thought I’d see if any FOI requests had revealed anything. There is a presentation on the Future Ticketing Project Phase 4 which has this most intriguing sentence.
FTP4 will introduce a mobile Ticketing App with notifications and purchase functionality; introduce Faster Universal Load and introduce Monday to Sunday Capping for Oyster Customers, all of which will encourage the existing migration to PAYG, reducing demand for season tickets in line with the Mayor’s policy.
I am astonished to see reference to a Mayoral policy to reduce demand for season tickets. What Mayoral policy is my question? That wasn’t in his manifesto and I don’t recall it in the Transport Strategy. What a bizarre policy position to hold!
PoP
But this issue will disappear when pay-as-you-go Oyster becomes a pseudo-bankcard later this year
Sorry, you have just lost me completely.
What are you talking about?
[ I assume it is something similar to what WW calls “updated Oyster”? ]
Greg Tingey,
Yes. Oyster cards will cease to charge for journeys. They will merely record what journeys you made and then at 4.30 a.m. the next day you will be charged a calculated amount. With Oyster this will be taken off your credit (which then may involve an auto-topup). This is similar to a credit card recording transactions for which you then get invoiced for the aggregated amount (because it may include refunds or other credits) at the end of the month.
Walthamstow Writer,
I have no inside information though an interesting talk a couple of years ago helped me grasp the mindset of those who decide the fare structure.
It is true that if your commute is entirely on the tube and involves some off-peak travel then you may be better off with pay-as-you-go. This is deliberate because shift workers are perceived as more poorly paid. Also if you don’t commute as many as 5 days a week you may benefit as efforts have been made to adjust to an economy where many people, for various reasons, work part-time.
Surely though, the issue for TfL is that if people use pay-as-you-go for a tube journey then TfL retain 100% percent of the revenue. If they buy a season ticket then TfL have to share the money gained with the rail companies according to an agreed formula.
PoP: Is that sharing business right? I would have expected that ticket revenue for a journey from, say, Upminster to central London would be shared between TfL and the other rail company, regardless of whether it’s a season ticket or PAYG. Am I wrong?
PoP
Thanks
ISTM that this is the threatened arrival of the “cancelling” of older Oyster cards ( Of which I still have one with a few quid on it ) – And their replacement with the new version … yes/no?
Does one still pay up-front for the new one until it runs out of money ( Unless you top-up ) or what?
Incidentally, may be off-topic, I saw someone get on a bus today, wave his bank-card at the reader, which then rejected it … confusion all round.
Malcolm. I’m certainly not a ticket expert, so maybe someone will be along shortly to give a better answer.
With a travelcard, on the example route you quoted, the revenue is shared began tfl and C2C. As I understand things, the isn’t any way to track the usage of a traditional card ticket, so no one knows whether the customer used the district line or the C2C train.
With oyster / contactless, the system “knows” whether the customer exited at Tower Hill (so must have used the district line, at least for the last part of the journey) or if they exited at Fenchurch St (so must have used C2C).
That would allow more specific fare allocation – though how you split the revenue when someone has hit the daily cap over multiple journeys I have not a clue!
@ Pop / Island Dweller – I think you are stretching things somewhat as to PAYG revenue going solely in the TfL pot. Some flows you may be able to be “accurate” as to what service has been used but for others you have no firm idea. People could travel between Upminster and Tower Hill and still use two operators. It may not be logical to some people but people do make some bizarre route choices. I would therefore expect revenues on long standing “inter available” routes to still be subject to some level of sharing. TfL and the TOCs may well have been able to tighten up the relative shares with the use of Oyster data but we all know Oyster / Contactless data is not 100% accurate for a wide variety of reasons. Coupled with the natural variability of passenger route choices this means you can’t be certain.
As you say paper tickets will be subject to the old revenue sharing provisions. Travelcard will follow whatever the updated rules / shares are in the Travelcard Agreement.
As a small aside I noted on something I was reading earlier that TfL have been slowly tightening up some of the “pink validator” rules to require people to touch “pink” twice en route at logical interchange points rather just once. This is to stop people touching just once and then dashing back downstairs and travelling via Zone 1!
@ Greg – AIUI no one is going to have their Oyster card cancelled. What is clear is that the first generation cards will not work with certain existing facilities / new functions coming on stream. TfL are therefore pushing very hard for people to move across to the newer card format.
On the TfL website it is all very clear as to what happens if you switch to a newer version of Oyster Card. As I am feeling nice today here is the link!
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/oyster/using-oyster/first-generation-oyster-cards
If you do not have a TfL online account for your Oyster card I would strongly recommend that you set one up. It seems to offer the most painless upgrade path.
It is perfectly possible for bank cards to be rejected if the card holder’s bank has flagged the card for some reason. TfL devices, including bus readers, receive regular “warning list” updates throughout the traffic day.
WW
Thanks – I heard about this ages back – went to station, told not to worry.
Having now looked through the stuff on “your” TfL link, the obvious thing is to trundle down to the local station (WHC) & get them to “sell” me a replacement with the credit transferred across.
Because I have a “geriatric’s pass” ( over-65 ) I very, very rarely use my Oyster, but it’s a very useful back-up to have – as well as “contactless” which I would only use in extremis
I wonder how many other “older” people are also in this position?
@Islanddweller As I understand it, decisions on how traditional card travelcard money is shared are based in part on surveys sent out in the post.
In my household, where some years there have been two annual travelcard commuters, we have regularly received what are effectively card diaries to complete with details of every single journey made over the next 7 days be it train, tube, bus or whatever.
I always wondered if because of our transport interest we were good respondants and that’s why some years we have been asked to complete the diary twice.
AP. Interesting. I held an annual travelcard for about twenty years, but never once received a survey.
Hello everyone,
A couple of months ago I was looking for some advice on whether Heathrow employees would still be eligible for their 75% discount on the new line from Paddington to Heathrow… Well, we have finally arrived to Day 1, the kick-off day for the new line and have to tell you guys I could hardly find a single person neither at Paddington nor at Heathrow station on any exact and accurate information on this topic, affecting loads of airport commuters.
I was promised that they will investigate the issue and address it to the resp. departments, however obviously, no one I’ve approached could provide me any suggestion where to turn to or where to buy the new season ticket for TFL Rail. After being turned away from Heathrow and Paddington I was finally sent to Ealing Broadway as the only available TFL Rail Ticjet Office. I could finally manage to purchase the right ticket there, however still not sure why there canot be any MANNED ticket office at the two most important stations of the new line either at Paddington or Heathrow Terminals… This is ridiculous that you need to travel to a third “neutral” station to buy a season ticket with the 75% discount on this service.
Has anyone possess any information when this not sustainable siuation will be resolved meaning any more TFL Rail Ticket offices might be opened in the near future?
Also, on Heathrow Connect it was impossible to buy a season ticket days (weeks) in advance (for example in case a longer holiday), it was only available the day before and literally at 12.00pm before the validity date. As this was valid as part of the National Rail setvices, now, with TFL does anyone know whether these season tickets or travel cards could be purchased well in advance or similar to the practice of GWR only a day before the start date?
Would appreciate if anyone of you could provide some useful update/info on this.
@Airliner767 – Whilst I cannot answer your question directly, I can say that Southern Railway offers an online facility whereby one can purchase a season ticket of any standard sort at the time of writing to commence on any date from now until the 5th June.
Surely that kind of facility is available at a ticket office at Heathrow? Alternatively, have you asked your employer?
@AIRLINER767
The prices are here…
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/fares/caps-and-travelcard-prices
There are TfL Rail staff on the platforms or ticket, the are all very friendly.
Just get an Oyster Card and use the online system, no need to visit any ticket office anywhere.
If you want to know why there are no manned ticket offices, the current UK Foreign Secretary did that.
A767 & GF
Well, my local TfL (Overgound) station ticket office have always been happy to sell advance tickets, including seasons at any time & also tickets to/from other destinations.
So something appears to have gone seriously wrong in your part of the world.
Question: Are “GWR” in breach of their operating conditions, by refusing to sell advance tickets??
Airliner767,
Not selling advance tickets in this day and age makes no real sense at all. It seems to be something perpetuated when the original reason for it has gone.
Historically, there was always a reluctance to sell advance tickets for fear passengers would use them before their commencement date and then reuse them subsequently on the date(s) on the ticket. This was particularly the case with season tickets which had a large expiry date but a small commencement date that was hard to spot. So the rule for season tickets was not more than 24 hours in advance unless you surrendered your old season ticket and there was no break of continuity – even then it was a maximum of four days.
There was also the anomaly that you could not buy an off-peak single or return ticket on the day of travel until the off-peak period had started but you could but it in advance the day before.
Finally, there was also the fear for the booking clerk that selling advance tickets and forgetting to reset the date on the ticket machine would lead to considerable chaos so many were reluctant to do it.
With modern ticketing and ticket gates absolutely none of this makes any sense.
Malcolm has pointed out to me that the main thrust of Airliner767 was about the fact that he could not get a discount formerly available and how does people in his situation continue to get it. The issue of buying tickets in advance is really a side issue to that.
So perhaps future replies should concentrate on that rather than the issue of buying tickets in advance.
From what’s left in Google’s cache of the page….
“If you currently hold a LHR ID card, you are entitled to the following discounted travel from all stations between Paddington and Reading including the Maidenhead, Twyford, Windsor and Greenford branch lines to/from Heathrow Airport on the Heathrow Connect Service.
Season Tickets: Heathrow Airport workers who hold a LHR ID card are entitled to a 75% discount on a weekly, monthly and annual season ticket; the discount applies to the FULL fare tickets only.
To purchase your season ticket simply go to your local Great Western Railway ticket office and show a valid LHR Heathrow Airport ID card to get a 75% discount on the full ticket price. As with most season tickets, you will need to fill out a season ticket application form and get a photo ID card. You can do this from the following stations:
Paddington, Langley, Greenford, Ealing Broadway, Slough, Castle Bar Park, Acton Mainline, West Ealing, Burnham, Hayes, Hanwell, Taplow, Southall, Maidenhead, West Drayton,
Iver, Twyford, Reading
You will not be able to purchase your season ticket from Heathrow Express Ticket Offices located at Heathrow Airport and Paddington or the Airport Commuter centre.
For more information please call +44 (0) 345 604 1515.”
I think that the clear answer is .. GWR no longer operate trains to Heathrow Airport.
Thanks for all the comments guys, really apprciate it, even if my original question(s) haven’t been fully answered yet.
The last comment from Briantist refers to the “old” system when Heathrow Connect was operating, fully aware of it & is no longer valid anymore.
Secodly, I’ve asked my employer (airline) where no one knows anything on the new benefits of the new line, absolute shambles everywhere and no one really knows where to turn to or who is actually in possession of the correct information (if any at all!).
Just a remark, Heathrow has NO TFL Rail offices at all nor any station staff, just Heathrow Express staff who are fully unaware of this discounted pass nor where to purchase it. In the old system it was possible to buy or ask for any assistance at Heathrow even from a Heathrow Express staff on any Heathrow Connect-related questions or ticketing issues.
The link that you kindly provided refers to Oyster Card-based tckets and passes, nothong to do with our Heathrow-offered 75% discount, as you are not able to top up or buy any season tickets with 75% discount on your yster card, so absolutely useless to have an Oyster Card in this case unless you travel PAYG (without the LHR discount)…
Even if in the meantime I have managed to purchase my LHR-discounted season ticket, the question is still open whether it is really only Ealing Broadway which is capable to issue such season ticket (with the discount)? Simply unbelievable that a huge station like Paddington has NO TFL Rail Ticket Office facilities set up for this purpose and that even the GWR staff was also briefed by myself Monday morning that this oppirtunity for LHR workers is still in place! Shocking!
In my opinion the biggest and real change to the new service is not December when the “fluffy” new Eliabeth Line will be up ad running, it has actually just been this Monday with all the new ticketing options, incorporation of the GWR fares into the TFL system etc that should have been placed a higher focus on and simply unacceptanbe that no accurate information was provided for the regular commuters (and tourists!) nor competent staff was present at the biggest hubs like at Heatrow Terminals or Paddington (just at a “D” priority station like Ealing Broadway!).
Regarding your comments like buying tickets in advance, hpefully at least this will be available also anytime, however npted your remarks on the real reason why this was not possibe to sell. In my humble opinion, this could have been easily eliminated by simply inserting the start of validity on the ticket rather than just the end of validity of the ticket…….common sense really guys…..just look around not far on the “Mainland” all the biggest capitals issue tickets/passes including both the start of validity AND expiry date!
Anyway, hope this complaint reaches all the “bigwigs” at either TFL/GWR or God knows who else is involved in this matter and will resolve this situation soonest…
@airliner767: It is perhaps worth understanding the context for this. Quoting the Mayoral Decision on Heathrow fares:
All employees based at Heathrow Airport, whether employed by Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) or another company, are entitled to a 75 per cent discount on season tickets and single fares to Heathrow using the current Heathrow Connect service. The 75 per cent discount extends to Reading and Paddington. In general, these discount fares are substantially below standard TfL fares.
The discounts are currently provided by Connect/GWR on a goodwill basis. HAL does not fund the discounts directly. TfL is not obliged to offer equivalent concessions but is agreeing a new, funded concession arrangement with HAL which will enable all employee concessions to be maintained.
In other words, in the past Heathrow workers have been cross-subsidised by Heathrow passengers. This was sustainable because the service was jointly owned by Heathrow. Now the service is run by TfL, TfL have no interest in subsidising Heathrow workers, so Heathrow Airport Ltd have agreed to pay TfL to maintain the discount.
Evidently whatever agreement Heathrow have made with TfL did not include particularly good arrangements for actually issuing the tickets. Arguably with this kind of private concession the best option would be for Heathrow Airport to issue the tickets themselves (they should have the ability to do this at Heathrow Express ticket offices).
@AIRLINER767
I understand your frustration at having 75% discount ticket being taken away with no-one really saying anything about it.
I must say that I have been to almost all of the TfL Rail stations since Sunday and I have easily found and spoken to their highly visible staff. But, due to one their trains breaking down, I didn’t make it all the way to Heathrow.
“TfL Rail” is a strange beast with less than six months to live. The “brand” is owned by Transport for London, which is a government department. MTR Crossrail Ltd won the right to run the brand and the upcoming Liz Line, which means they “own” the trains, the depots and gateline staff. But the ticketing system remains with TfL.
MTR Crossrail has no interface with the public: the only route for publicity, complaints and the like is via the central TfL call centres, head offices and the like.
This means that there are no ticket offices in TfL Rail only stations, because the duty of the staff in the stations is to assist the customer experience. There are ticket offices at Abbey Wood: manned by SouthEastern staff; at Romford, Liverpool Street and Shenfield, Greater Anglia and so on. Things are complicated a little by TfL owing the stations to the east, but not those to the west.
So, yes, TfL doesn’t do ticket offices. They have been removed everywhere, replaced by rows of easy to use Oyster vending machines for tourists and online services for Londoners.
So, your observation that there is no one to ask I don’t believe to be right. And yes, there are no ticket machines by design.
But… workers at Heathrow are onto a bargain, because they can use a “Travelcard” that includes Zone 6 to avoid the premium charge on TfL Rail to the airport.
You can buy a weekly Zone 5&6 Travelcard either online or at any TfL Ticket machine for £25.50 or £62.30 from Zone 1. You never stated where you were travelling from, but I have some sample prices.
– Heathrow->Hayes & Harlington, £6.20 trip, £46.50 a week with 75% discount, now £25.50
– Southall & Hanwell, £6.80 trip, £51 a week with discount, now £28.20
– West Ealing, Ealing Broadway, £7.90 a trip, £59.25 before, now £33.90
– Paddington, was £10.20 a trip, £76.50 a week with discount, £62.30 but with full Zone 1 travel included.
So, the answer about your 75% discount is, that it’s now an even bigger one.
@Briantist
“Transport for London, which is a government department”
Just to clarify, it is a department of the Greater London Authority (local government, or City Hall), not central government (aka Dept of Transport, or “Whitehall”)
I work at Heathrow in a passenger assistance role and use Heathrow Connect and now TfL Rail, for my travel, however I have a Freedom Pass and previously paid £1.50 fare between Hayes and Terminals 2/3.
There was a staff information sheet (as a PDF) dated 11/5/2018 providing information regarding the Tfl takeover and the 75% discount – Airline767 should try and find a copy.
What is evidently ridiculous is that Terminal 5 does not appear on the TfL Rail map or the updated Underground map.
Passengers, who are using Tfl Rail and Oyster Pay-as-You-Go or Contact-less, and are travelling to or from Terminal 5 have to touch in or out there, or do TfL Rail expect passengers to use the Piccadilly line between Terminals 2/3 and Terminal 5.
You now have the possibility of passengers being double-charged from Terminal 5. A passenger having touched-in at Terminal 5, catches the inter-terminal transfer (i.e. Heathrow Express), fails to alight at Terminals 2/3, and then is charged the Hex fare by the on-board staff.
Also, on Sunday and Tuesday, there have been signal failures at Heathrow resulting in the closure of the Terminal 4 branch, so causing the TfL Rail services being diverted to Terminal 5. The TfL Twitter account was reporting that their services were terminating/starting at Terminals 2/3. Hopefully, they did carry passengers to/from Terminal 5.
Briantist
but Tfl DO “DO” ticket offices – or is the one at Walthamstow Central ( TfL/Overground ) from which I have bought many tickets a mirage & a figment of my imagination?
I think not.
Greg Tingey,
I think you have misunderstood Briantist’s point.
His argument was that TfL don’t do ticket offices because London Overground and TfL Rail ticket offices are not staffed by TfL staff – even though they wear a TfL Rail or London Overground uniform.
So, whatever you may think, you are not talking to a TfL employee as TfL do not have employees who work in ticket offices. They will be employed by MTR or Arriva.
@ PoP – surely that is an irrelevance? Regardless of whose employee sits in a ticket office at a National Rail station and which organisation contracts the franchise service they are required to sell the full range of NR tickets. I do think the point that Airliner 767 has raised has been missed in almost all of the comments.
The discounted season ticket scheme has been continued despite the TfL Rail takeover of the service. The stations that TfL Rail took over weeks ago (not at the weekend) should still be able to sell the ticket. Nothing has changed. I also fail to see why the main ticket office at Paddington couldn’t / wouldn’t sell the ticket. Again nothing has changed in terms of a discounted ticket being available on presentation of the appropriate employee ID. There is no need to find a “TfL” ticket office.
Even allowing for the lack of fanfare and rebranding at stations out west they are part of the TfL Rail service / MTR Crossrail contract. The public will associate the name “TfL Rail” with TfL regardless of whatever subtleties we may know about. On that basis TfL *do* do ticket offices. The scenario that Briantist presents does not apply at stations on the Overground or TfL Rail. Ticket offices have not been closed (yet) and been replaced by ticket machines. I believe the plans for the station rebuilds out west all include a ticket office.
I understand TfL DO want to shut as many Overground ticket offices as they can and there is a priced option with Arriva to do that. However they will need to comply with statutory consultation processes and secure sign-off from Mr Grayling. I would imagine there will be a fair amount of opposition to the closure of Overground ticket offices.
@ Briantist – it is simply not true that TfL own the stations on the Shenfield route (barring Stratford which is mixed ownership and Shenfield which is a Gtr Anglia stn). They have long term leases but that does not give them the freehold. Network Rail retains that.
It is simply incorrect to say there no ticket offices at stations run by TfL Rail. I have just checked each stn on the National Rail website. *All* have ticket offices and many are staffed for two shifts M-Sat. Hours are a bit less on Sundays and some are closed on Sundays. Now either the National Rail website is wrong or …… ? I have actually read the MTR Crossrail concession agreement – the ticketing and retail obligations are clear and comprehensive. None of them involve the closure or non operation of ticket offices just because there are more staff floating round to help people.
@WALTHAMSTOW WRITER
I think it might be possible that there are different interpretations of what “ticket office” means. There is one view that it is just a place where you can buy tickets at a station, and another one perhaps that include the traditional idea of speaking to a human though a glass portal. It’s almost philosophical …. Is there a ticket office at King’s Cross Underground?
You are correct about my simplification of “long term lease” to “own”.
@ Briantist – I am sorry but there are no different interpretations on TfL contracted national rail services. They are traditional ticket offices. There is no multi functional “let’s pretend it’s a sweet shop / ticket office / control room / waiting room” stuff on TfL Rail or on London Overground. It is not remotely philosophical in my view and it doesn’t help people trying to get clarity on where they can buy a ticket to make it so.
If by “Kings Cross Underground” you mean the tube stations (there are two but linked together) at Kings Cross St Pancras then there is NOT a ticket office that is staffed by London Underground employees.
There is a Visitor Centre staffed by TfL employees which is something different as it is really just the old Travel Information Centre given a glossy makeover.
There are, of course, ticket offices at Kings Cross mainline and also at St Pancras International supplemented by a wide array of ticket machines for Thameslink, Great Northern, VTEC, South Eastern and Eurostar. Is that thorough and pedantic enough? 😉
Walthamstow Writer,
For clarity, I have no interest in this debate.
It is clear to me that to the passenger a London Overground or TfL Rail ticket office is a TfL ticket office. It not staffed by TfL employees which was the point that Briantist was making (I think). At the end of the day the company who pays those who work inside is not TfL.
To me a ticket office is an office with a window to talk to the ticket/booking clerk. A station may have a ticket hall which may have a ticket office or ticket machines or both.
I was merely pointing out that Greg had not grasped the point that Briantist was making. I offered no personal opinion on the subject nor do I either agree or disagree with Briantist’s point.
OK, guys, now I know at least the background of this whole story, appreciate for sharing with us.
Actually, I am commuting from Paddington, so Zone 1 to Heathrow, so the fares you copied in refers only to the Oyster-based PAYG Travelcard scheme which is totally different to the structure we enjoy with the “ex” season tickets on GWR or TFL Rail currently. So the remark that the discount is actually bigger is simply not true, I still paid £15.50 for a weekly season ticket (Not Oyster travecard!) on TFL Rail – same it cost me on the old Heathrow Connect Line.
But anyway, as long as the ticket prices will be kept the same, I am not complaining, as this is the most important factor for me, however the ticket office issue in my opinion is still “open”:
I understand your point that it depends on who is actually operating the service, or part of the service, who is the owner etc.., my point is still the same: If living and commuting from Paddington to Heathrow only, why will I need each time when buying a new season ticket to take off the train at Ealing Broadway as neither Heathrow nor Paddington is able to sell me such discounted TFL Rail (Not Oyster travelcard once more!) season tickets.
Anyway, this seems to be a neverending story and can just hope that this discount for us will not be taken away in the upcoming future…whoever is the actual owner/service provider or if agreed or subsidized by Heathrow or not…
@ Airliner767 – Based on another post it sounds like there is a notice that was published recently that you need to catch up with (assuming you’ve not seen it). I would also seek confirmation from Heathrow Airport Limited directly or via your employer as to the precise nature of the new agreement covering your travel concession including its duration.
I would reiterate the point that GWR should retain the obligation to sell the ticket at Paddington as they have to impartially retail tickets regardless of who is now the operator of the train service you use. It is frankly ludicrous that a regulated TOC is somehow sidestepping its obligations. Heathrow Express (at Heathrow) have no such obligations as they are not a TOC in the usual sense – they are effectively an open access operator that sits outside of many of the railway industry rules and obligations.
Briantist/PoP/GT etc
“[Briantist’s} argument was that TfL don’t do ticket offices because London Overground and TfL Rail ticket offices are not staffed by TfL staff – even though they wear a TfL Rail or London Overground uniform.”
Using that same argument, TfL don’t do trains, either (except on the Underground), nor buses, trams, DLR…
BetterBee,
Well, in a sense they don’t. Current DLR trains are TfL owned but the replacements will won’t be (initially) though they hope to buy them eventually.
Actually not all Underground trains are owned by TfL. Northern line ones aren’t but Jubilee lines are. It has been suggested that TfL are keener to replace the Northern line ones because if they don’t they keep paying leasing charges whereas they have an incentive to keep the Jubilee line ones going for as long as it is sensible to do so.
All relevant issues that have to be borne in mind in certain circumstances. So when the commissioner tells the TfL board ‘we’ have replaced exhaust filters on buses with cleaner oneS then TfL has done nothing other than order the work to be done, paid for work and possibly inspect it. ‘They’ (TfL) have done the paperwork. All the dirty work was done by another company and their eimployees.
Below is a ‘Cut and Paste’ from the Heathrow staff information document I referred to earlier with regards to TfL Rail/Heathrow Connect.
Heathrow Connect
As TfL Rail replaces Heathrow Connect services on 20 May the following changes will be implemented:
The newly installed gates at Heathrow Airport will be switched on and will accept National Rail tickets, contactless payment, Oyster and zone 6 travelcards for travel on TfL Rail services only
All colleagues will continue to save up to 75% off TfL Rail tickets between Heathrow and Paddington at least until the end of 2019. Tickets must be purchased from any TfL Rail ticket office between Paddington and Hayes and Harlington only, please note that discounted TfL Rail tickets won’t be sold at Heathrow stations. Discount doesn’t apply for contactless or Oyster payment
TfL standard peak times will apply Monday to Friday (not on public holidays or at the weekend) between 06:30 and 09:30, and between 16:00 and 19:00
With the 75% discount a single PAYG fare in peak hours between Heathrow and Paddington could cost as little as £2.55 or from Ealing Broadway £1.83 for all colleagues who purchase a ticket in advance using their airport ID.
Colleagues who currently own a Heathrow Connect yearly, monthly or weekly ticket valid beyond 20 May can continue using it on TfL Rail services between Heathrow and Paddington.
There is no information with regards to stations between West Drayton and Reading.
Hopefully this is what Airliner767 wants to know.
Westfiver: Anyone who reads the document which you quote, if not personally affected, might think that it all sounds very reasonable. The little catches which we might not have known about without Airliner767’s account are (1) there is no TfL ticket office at Paddington, and (2) hitherto these tickets were purchasable at a wider range of places (including Paddington and Heathrow). So Airliner767’s aggrieved feelings are understandable.
Unfortunately, the only available response – whether to Airliner767 or anyone else affected by anything TfL does – is to offer sympathy. Most, perhaps all, of us have no channels available (*) to put such things right or even to prevent repetition.
(*) Apart, perhaps, from very indirect channels like national or local ballot boxes.
Failure to offer the means to maintain and improve airport and airline staff usage of public transport to/from Heathrow Airport (i.e. the modal split between, especially, car and rail/tube/bus) will jeopardise the possibility of Heathrow Runway 3 being sanctioned. Getting the staff ticketing wrong would be a weak link in the chain.
Westfiver and all – finally, many thanks, yes that is the information I was looking for!!!
In the meantime I ‘ve also learned that it really depends on the person who is actually sitting at the counter at Paddington being or not aware of this discounted pass, so fingers crossed next time I will be served by a knowledgable and well informed ticket agent so that I can avoid getting off at Ealing Broadway to buy a monthly pass!
Thanks again for all the clarification and some very interesting background information I’ve learned from this very useful thred!
@Airliner767 – Print off a copy or two of Westfiver’s contribution above and have it ready to thrust against the window in the event of encountering a reticent ticket counter person.
@WW
In the interests of using up-to-date data, here are photos of the ticket offices at TfL stations taken in the last few days:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/aQp44lkzOXANxz3C3
Abbey wood: ticket office in new station
Shenfied: three window office, one open
Brentwood: two windows, one open
Harold wood: in the station car park there is a ticket window, one of two was open in a blue portacabin
Gidea Park: away from the main entrance, one of two was open in a blue portacabin
Romford: two windows of four in an old-style large ticket office
Chadwell Heath: new ticket office, one of two open
Goodmayes: large ticket window in blue portacabin.
Seven Kings: new ticket office, one of two open
Ilford: old style ticket office, two windows open
Manor Park: two new ticket offices, however they are a good long walk from where the current station entrance is.
Forest Gate: blue portacabin by the road, one windows, a short walk from the current entrance
Maryland: one window in the ticket hall, closed (sign says open limited hours)
Heathrow T2&3: just a row of machines
Hayes and Harlington: in the car-park, if you search there are two ticket windows in a blue portacabin. However they were both closed, but only because someone needed a comfort break.
Southall: Single window office, open
West Ealing “Station”: cramped but single window ticket office open
Ealing Broadway: if you look carefully there was a single ticket window open, of three.
Acton Mainline “Station”: outdoor window, same sign as Maryland.
So, I can see why I had managed to think that there were stations without ticket offices because simply visiting the station’s gateline you can’t see them…
Hello everyone,
Just moving forward with regards to the full opening of Crossrail on the Paddigton to Heathrow leg, has anyone got any information on whether Heathrow employees will still benefit from the 75% discounted fares/season tickets also after the opening in autumn 2019?
The reason why I’m asking is that at the moment we are enjoying the same “old” discounted fare system as part f TFL Rail that we were offered under the “Heathrow Connect” brand, but not too sure what will happen to this fare structure after the Crossrail full operating?
If Crossrail will fully replace TFL Rail between Paddington and Heathrow as of autumn, how will our “benefit” be integrated into the TFL ticketing structure? At the moment we have to buy this sort of ticket/pass from the National Rail in order to use TFL Rail, but if this will be discontinued and all ticketing and fare options will be integrated fully to TFL? Does anyone know how this will work, or maybe won’t be offered this discount at all?
Crossrail will operate Reading – Paddington from December 2019.
Any thoughts on whether there will be any change to:
1) Fares
2) Oyster/PAYG acceptance
From December?
Or will there be no change to either – and it will be the same as under GWR in terms of tickets / fares, just different trains / operator?
I’m about to renew by annual season ticket from Maidenhead – I’m guessing there’s no point delaying in hope of a fare reduction (very unlikely, but you never know!).
And will freedom passes work?
@ALANBG my understanding is that once TfL commence running the service Freedom passes will have to be honoured. Although for example Reading is way outside London the terms of the Freedom Pass regulations require it to be honoured.
Excellent!
On 29th February 2020, Reading is added to the football grounds I can travel to for free.
Even though it will be slow.
Tfl not installing Oyster between Iver and Reading??? I suspect high fares in these places on crossrail???