The Covid pandemic has had a lasting impact on Britain’s railways. Undoubtedly the most significant impact has been on changing travel patterns in general and, in particular, a reduction in commuting and other business travel which is not expected to ever fully return. Possibly the second most significant long-term impact is an acceleration in changes to ticketing. This was something that was already happening but Covid has focused minds and speeded up a revolution that was already gathering pace. We look at significant changes that are happening and may happen in the future.
Abolition of much of First Class Travel
First Class travel does not affect many people – and that is really the whole point. With the standard of comfort in Standard Class rising over the years, there is less that differentiates between the two classes of travel. Nowadays, First Class accommodation is sometimes officially declassified and often effectively declassified by others either deliberately flouting the rules or simply overlooking that the accommodation was only for passengers with First Class tickets. Its days on many routes may be numbered judging by the recent decline in services that still offer First Class travel.
Possibly one reason for retention in British Rail days was that First Class travel was a highly prized perk by all levels of management – the very people who would be responsible for its continuation or otherwise. This perk is now only available to relatively few people and is probably not treated with the protective instinct that it once was.
Since privatisation, Chiltern Railways probably started the ball rolling with only Standard Class from the outset, although for a while they did introduce a business zone on their few loco hauled trains. Likewise, c2c have never had First Class, and about five years ago Anglia culled it from all but their Norwich inter-city services.
The trend is clearly to remove First Class from commuter railways and save it for long distance quality travel. It is not the money-spinner it once was imagined to be, and today’s continuation may be more about not losing business altogether from passengers who would probably travel either First Class by rail or by other means of transport for their longer journeys.
It has to be borne in mind that a 25% reduction in seats by a typical First Class seat arrangement (1 + 2 seating) requires a 33% increase in revenue to raise the same fare income from Standard Class (2 + 2 seating), and that assumes that seat occupancy rate (as a percentage) is unaltered. With that generally not being the case, it is clear that providing First Class travel is both a money-loser and an ineffective way of using one’s assets.
Nowadays, in commuter stock, the seating arrangement is often the same for First Class as it is Standard Class, with possibly a little more legroom. It therefore can seem to the passenger that the fare is a third extra than Standard Class with no discounts available for the privilege of having an antimacassar on one’s headrest.
What probably brought the First Class issue to a head recently was SouthEastern’s discovery and revelation that post-Covid they only had 29 First Class season ticket holders. The decision to end First Class travel on their services was a no-brainer. This may have helped LNWR come to a late decision to abolish First Class from the May 2023 timetable. The new Class 730 trains for LNWR that aren’t already complete will be configured for Standard Class only, and ones that currently have First Class accommodation will be retrofitted to be Standard Class only before entry into service.
Expect South Western Railway and Govia Thameslink Railway to follow the trend towards abolishing First Class with keen interest. Govia would probably like to remove First Class from Thameslink trains, which can become quite full and have an awkward arrangement where some First Class seating is declassified south of Farringdon. This could be achieved at almost zero cost by simply declassifying the currently designated seats, or an arrangement with Siemens could be made to reconfigure the relevant carriages which might work out to be surprisingly expensive for what would appear to be a simple modification.
As stated at the start, First Class accommodation is probably not a significant change to many people but, in terms of being willing to make drastic changes to the ticketing regime on the railways, it does indicate that nothing is sacred. If First Class travel is becoming a thing of the past, what other significant ticketing policies will change?
The Demise of Season Tickets
A feature of Covid, quickly felt, was the refund of almost all season tickets as they were no longer required. As the government was asking us (or telling us) not to travel except for essential reasons, they obviously felt obliged to refund unexpired season tickets without penalty. Only essential workers really had a reason to keep their season tickets.
Once the dependence on season tickets was broken it was going to be hard for commuters to return to the habit of using them. Unless they regularly went into the office for five days a week, it often made more sense to simply pay-as-you-go with an Oyster or a bank card. This would also increase flexibility at a time when one did not know if a new wave of Covid would come along and require full-time working from home to recommence.
A secondary effect of the demise of season tickets was that every day one went into the office cost real money in daily travelling costs. So, in some cases, this could swing a decision as to whether to go into work or not. In other cases, it was realised that minor modifications to working times could mean that an off-peak fare could be charged. Along with this was the consequential further reduction in income to the railway operating company – which is usually effectively bankrolled by the DfT these days. With Wi-Fi on trains, some people realised that they could adjust their working hours at the office and perform basic office tasks such as checking emails on their commute in order to qualify for off-peak fares.
Why have Season Tickets?
The demise of season tickets reignites the issue of why have season tickets at all? They really don’t make much sense in an era of wave-and-pay.
The traditional advantage for the railways of getting money ‘up front’ no longer holds. They can nowadays borrow money much cheaper than the discounted rate for a season ticket. With few people nowadays actually walking up to a ticket office counter to buy a ticket, the removal of the burden of the ticket office having to sell a ticket on a daily basis to regular travellers no longer applies.
It will be interesting to see if there are any future moves to eliminate season tickets. One obvious stealth approach is to withdraw monthly season tickets and include a monthly cap on wave and pay, although this would probably be quite complex to introduce.
If season tickets were to continue it seems that the basis for charging them needs to be reconsidered. The number of days a week at a daily rate required to justify a season tickets is tapered depending on distance, but 3.6 is a typical figure for a commute entirely within the London fares zones. This really doesn’t make it worthwhile for a person commuting for four days a week, given there will be days off for holiday, sickness, and possible work activities that may require a different journey (and therefore the fare is claimable on expenses). One expects that the revenue analysts will be crunching a lot of entry and exit numbers trying to work out an optimal level to charge so as not to lose too much revenue, whilst also encouraging people to make a commuting journey for more days per week.
The Rise of Split Ticketing
Split ticketing is the process of purchasing two tickets to cover a journey when this works out cheaper than buying a single through ticket. It has been around for decades but was little publicised. Its roots generally lie in scenarios where it was felt that a fast inter-city service would justify a premium over the slower and less-comfortable ‘slow’ service over the same line.
Split ticketing was often regarded in a similar manner to a legal tax dodge. Take advantage of it if you are in the know but keep quiet about it. The reason for keeping quiet was partly because it was seen as a legal way of cheating and therefore nothing to boast about. There was also the issue that, if it became too well known, measures would be taken to eliminate its use. In fact, a few years ago a restriction was put into place in the National Rail Conditions of Carriage requiring the train to actually stop at station where the split occurs but, other than that, it seems it would be hard to impose restrictions on its use.
With the rise of websites encouraging you to book your train tickets through them, split ticketing is openly seen as a selling point which enables cheaper fares to be offered. As well as the more straightforward split ticketing, the generally increased flexibility with travel arrangements and the savings that could be made has encouraged time-dependent split ticketing where avoiding peak hour fares can make a massive difference. For example, an expensive peak journey from East Croydon to Cardiff could be significantly cheaper if the Cardiff train departs from Paddington after 0930. Simply buy a ticket (or use contactless) from East Croydon to Paddington to cover the peak travel element and buy a separate ticket from Paddington to Cardiff.
This rise in split ticketing has reached the extent that businesses and other organisations (including government-supported charities) openly ask employees or volunteers to investigate whether their fare could be reduced by using split ticketing. We are led to believe split-ticketing now has a considerable impact on revenue and the DfT is concerned about the future consequences of this.
Closure of Ticket Offices
It seems to be a widely held belief that the government (or at least the Department for Transport) has a strong desire to close ticket offices at all stations, other than those where they can be commercially justified. Ticket office usage is now extremely low, yet there is a considerable lag in closing offices.
It cannot make sense for stations like lightly-used Tattenham Corner to be open from early morning until late evening or for Coulsdon Town to be open for similar hours. In the latter case not only is it one of the ten least used National Rail stations in the Greater London area, but Coulsdon South station is fairly close nearby as an alternative and, despite Coulsdon South being much busier, the ticket office isn’t open for such long hours.
There seems to be little doubt that Covid has brought about a reduction in practice in the number of ticket offices open and the hours that they are open for. It is salient to note that there is little or no clamour to ensure that opening times pre-Covid are restored.
Ticket office closures are particularly stark on SouthEastern where, post-Covid, many stations appear to be totally unstaffed for most of the time. It is generally hard to find a ticket office that is open and even such major stations as Lewisham, Greenwich, or Woolwich Arsenal seem to lack ticket office (or even any other) staff at the station.
In the case of SouthEastern one feels these closures have gone too far with nothing done to provide alternative facilities for those inconvenienced. In other words, the problem seems to be made much worse by the fact that this appears to have been done in a haphazard disorganised manner rather than according to any plan that has been put into place. Given that most train operating companies are, to a less or greater extent, in a similar position it seems that such a plan needs to be conceived and implemented at a higher level.
The Add-on Ticketing problem
The haphazard closing of ticket offices highlights issues where passengers have a legitimate need to purchase a ticket other than from the originating station. Most ticket machines only sell tickets from the station they are located at. One can understand the reluctance of most train operating companies to provide facilities of purchasing tickets from any station to any other station. It could lead to massive fare evasion with, for example, someone walking to an unstaffed South London station and purchasing a local ticket from Preston Park (just north of Brighton) to Brighton in order to make an illegal low-cost journey and exiting through the ticket gates at Brighton.
Some railway companies encourage passengers to purchase tickets on their phone. This, obviously, is available between most stations and this may have the same risk of fraudulent travel as a from-anywhere-to-anywhere ticket machine. One can expect this method of travel purchase to be encouraged in future as more barriers become compatible with optical scanners being added to active ticket gates when presented with a valid 2D barcode displayed on a phone.
Caught in the crosswires, as it were, with add-on ticket issues are passengers with a legitimate need to purchase tickets not available from ticket machines. These passengers may also not be comfortable buying tickets with the phones – or simply may not be able to do so. Two categories of passengers stand out.
Season tickets and other zonal tickets can create a problem for when passengers wish to travel beyond the zones their ticket or Oystercard is valid in. These customers need an add-on card. Unlike split ticketing, in this situation there is no actual requirement for the train to stop at the boundary station. If they have a season ticket and the destination station has card readers then there isn’t an issue – they simply tap out. Otherwise, the only really practical way to purchase these tickets are at a ticket office or on a smart phone.
Passengers with 60+ concessionary cards or London Freedom Passes can quite often have a legitimate need for an add-on ticket. For some journeys, especially return ones, there can be valid reasons for requiring a ticket from the zone 6 border rather than a specific nominated station. These situations, in general, are just not adequately catered for.
And, dare one say it, in a similar vein it could be argued that the person wanting to make a split ticket journey, which is perfectly legal, also needs a ticket office to be open to purchase their tickets or, alternatively, an ability to use a smart phone.
Project Oval
At this point you might be thinking that what is needed is a comprehensive rethink of the way rail deals with ticketing. You might think that TfL has gone a long way to put something suitable in place but more needs to be done. And it needs to be implemented beyond London as well as within London. Welcome to Project Oval.
Project Oval is a DfT sponsored plan to encompass all travel using pay-as-you-go technology in the South-East of England. The initial plan is to cover more than 230 stations, but bear in mind that includes stations already covered by pay-as-you-go. Exact details are sketchy as to where will be initially covered but the first phase seems to be quite a significant expansion of the area covered by the London zones. Initially not all features will be implemented with, for instance, discounted travel still requiring paper tickets for the foreseeable future.
What does seem fairly clear is the area ultimately intended to be covered by the current scheme as indicated on the map above. In fact the map is slightly out of date as, in advance of this, the Henley-on-Thames and and Marlow GWR branches already have contactless travel hardware installed and in use.
At present, the scheme is intended to be an expansion of TfL’s pay-as-you-go technology, administered by TfL on behalf of the DfT. Ultimately, it seems that the DfT is keen to tender the work out and remove TfL’s responsibility for administrating the scheme. Such an approach makes sense as the DfT don’t really want to be reliant on TfL. One also suspects that certain government ministers who do not like TfL and the current London Mayor for various reasons would not like TfL to have any leverage over the government.
TfL, for their part, would probably be happy, in principle, for this work to be taken off them so they can concentrate on providing a good passenger service rather than administering collecting the revenue. In practice and in the current economic climate they probably welcome the extra revenue (as a slice of the fare paid) enough to want to hold on to any future contract, so long as it is financially worthwhile to do so.
Friday is the New Hybrid Day
Finally, post-Covid society has brought into sharp focus the way Friday is becoming less and less a staple part of the working week. For the most part, the railways have so far failed to respond although Avanti seem to be already treating Friday as an off-peak day.
An obvious benefit, to society as well as the railways, of making Friday an off-peak day is to encourage people to work in the office on a Friday instead of one of the busy mid-week days. Railway companies have not yet got to the point where they have a Monday-Thursday timetable and a Friday timetable, but some services are now made up of fewer carriages on Mondays and Fridays. Some London bus routes (e.g. route 133) already have a different timetable for Friday.
Off-Peak all day Friday fares have already been suggested as something TfL could introduce. This was immediately rejected by TfL and the Mayor due to the loss of revenue that would entail. Whilst that is a valid argument not to remove peak fares on Fridays now, it is not necessarily a good argument at the next fare revision. Simply put, ‘Off Peak Friday’ could be introduced in a revenue neutral way if other fares were adjusted to take this into account.
Further pressure could be brought to bear for the Mayor to reconsider the pre-9.00 a.m. ban on free travel for those with 60+ and Freedom Passes on Friday. Loss of revenue is cited for the now-permanent removal of the free journeys before 9.00 a.m., but one does wonder what the actual loss of revenue would be if this facility was reinstated on Fridays. Unlike peak journeys in the morning on Mondays-Thursdays, the cost of providing the facility would be truly marginal with the small potential loss of revenue being the only significant factor.
How Will the Future see these changes?
One cannot predict how future railway historians will look at the current period of the railways in Britain when writing their history. For one thing, we don’t know how these changes will pan out. But one thing that is clear is the railways are currently in a period of rapid change. Unlike many other periods of change (e.g. nationalisation, privatisation) this was not a planned change but one forced upon it by a changing society.
Whatever happens, we are pretty sure that purchasing your rail travel in five or maybe ten years from now is going to be very different from how it was done in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thanks, as usual, to ngh for supplying a lot of the background information
One aspect of season ticketing not dealt with, and I don’t know how it’s changed – but a lot of the former Network Southeast area has significant school commutes – certainly as a child I had a Cobham to Guildford season ticket that was valid for the term rather than having to do week to week or month to month.
You say that first class was used a lot by business people. What you forget is that over the years first class was being restricted to fewer and fewer business people by companies cost cutting. Everywhere I’ve worked there’s always been a rule saying that you can’t claim for first class travel. I suspect the introduction of quiet coaches has had an impact on the demand for first class on longer journeys too. (Not having screaming children or drunk football supporters was alwasy a benefit of first class seats)
First class on suburban/commuter routes is just a plain waste of space. Whilst not a regular train commuter, I’ve rarely seen people get turffed out of sparse first class areas in rush hour when standard class is rammed. And when I’ve used a rush-hour train, first class has always looked sparse.
As a consumer I’ve only ever used first class when there’s been some kind of special offer. (Anyone else remember the “Weekend First” tickets BR used to offer?) Otherwise first class is just too expensive. And as you say, quality in standard class has improved over the year.
Thinking about it, the only reason for keeping first class is because you’re more likely to get your reserved first class seat than standard class. I gave up on booking seat reservations (where available) as you rarely actually get your reserved seat.
I can’t see TfL losing the contract for contactless extension any time soon – the lines are just too inextricably linked with London’s fare zones (and the daily/weekly caps). A jointly-operated system might be more viable (and could then eventually be operated nationally, or at least offered to other urban areas like Greater Manchester, where national rail and metro systems overlap).
Add-on tickets: London boundary zone tickets aren’t available to purchase online with Southeastern or Southern but they are with C2C. However if you buy a Boundary ticket online from C2C you cannot add it to your C2C Smart card- it must be collected from a National Rail ticket machine.
Southeastern often has a mixture of routes and fares differ depending on route so the inability to buy a boundary fare means that the traveller can often pay more than they should e.g. Bromley South to Sevenoaks via Knockholt or Swanley.
Does the 33% increase take into account perks such as free coffee / food / wifi? Or is that purely based on seating arrangement?
Talking about a special timetable on Fridays, in Hong Kong, MTR actually runs a Friday timetable on most lines which is busier than other weekdays to cope with Friday night revellers, I know this sounds ridiculous in post-COVID cost-conscious world but it should be something to be considered for urban operators.
RE: ticket offices.
It’s been many years since I bought a paper bus pass, but these used to be available from selected corner shops.
If it’s still the case; is there any reason why these same shops couldn’t also sell train tickets?
Many stations have a small shop in or near them that is open at times when the ticket office isn’t…
There are collective/group/class legal actions ongoing about insufficient availability of Boundary fares https://www.boundaryfares.com/–that may be worth highlighting in the text of the article.
I think the existing first class sections on selected longer routes should be repurposed to better support travel by passengers who cannot stand for any significant time on a crowded train on a longer journey, i.e. priority seating. This could be an extended version of the current TfL “Baby on Board” badge scheme, with presumption that a passenger in need could ask for a (otherwise declassified) first class seat to be vacated. Augmented by an “on the day” version for ad hoc travellers where a day entitlement could be purchased from a ticket machine for e.g. £5 (with all the revenue donated to suitable charities or hypothecated into funding to better support disabled travel on the railways.), and/or entitlement capable of being “embedded” for a supplementary annual fee (revenue donated) into appropriate concessionary cards (maybe adding a new concessionary card with country-wide scope, off peak, and less requirements than current disabled card)
Also, late night first class declassification on some routes or low cost on-train upgrades (roll out something like seatfrog to all operators, or have a standard late night upgrade charge of say £2.50 which guards can collect or is offered from ticket machines.) Especially where the rolling stock has tables for first class but not standard class (metro stock, e.g. SWR 444’s)
@DJL
Good question. The answer is: Complexity. In the days pre-Oyster PASS agents would sell zonal tickets for one day and 7 days. Can’t remember if they sold monthlies. I know they didn’t sell either Odd Period or Annuals.
The number of permutations for the old TfL/LT system for different types was very limited compared to National Rail. I think the National Fares Manual has 1 – 2 m different fares.
There’s an obvious attraction to selling rail tickets through a retailer but the fare structure would need to be simplified and you’d need a very clearly defined subset of tickets for sale.
Friday could become a half-way house for TfL. Morning peak for those on a regular work day, and off-peak in the afternoon to promote leisure travel.
Re DJL’s comment re other places able to sell tickets:
Not sure how post and legal gambling is handled in the UK, but taking Sweden as an example it’s common since some years that some supermarkets and some corner shops handle things like betting and various post office errands. These things surely has some legal requirements for the supermarket/corner shop to be able to participate, and would in general sort out who could or could not work as staff at that kind of place. The point I’m trying to get to, in a convoluted way, is that it’s 100% likely that staff that handles these things could also handle selling tickets. You could probably not demand that they actually know anything about which tickets are the best option for a particular traveller/journey, but at least they could be able to sell a ticket that someone wants to buy.
Re travel cards v.s. pay-as-you-go:
A downside of pay-as-you-go is that people might drive their car rather than using public transport for,for example, weekend leisure activities. This might not be desirable.
Another downside of pay-as-you-go is the constant need to keep track of touching in and out correctly, at least with the penalty fare policy that has been in place since Oyster were first introduced. I why there is a penalty fare, but an easy solution to the problem of unfair application of the penalty fare would be to have ticket machines / validators offer an option to pay upfront for the cap rate for a given set of zones, and if that has been done never have to pay a penalty fare within that set of zones for that day.
In general I would say that it would be great if decision makers and the general public asks themself who the railway is for and what the purpose of the fares and penalty fares are. As a foreigner that only have visited London as a tourist a few times, my impression is that the railways seem to at least partially be there for various entities to make money off, and the fares seem to at least partially be there to cram out as much money as possible from the traveller and/or to make sure that no-one ever gets away with not paying as much as everyone else.
I know that I have been dragging this subject up every now and then, but think it’s relevant to drag it up again.
The fact that there is even room for the excellent third party free site http://www.oyster-rail.org.uk to exist is a sign that something is wrong. If TfL, DfT and the various TOCs aren’t able to give this information clearly to the travellers, how are they even able to specify how their equipment should be configured and how can they tell if things are set up correctly or not?
Another problematic example is when ticket barriers are open due to crowd control issues. Sure, it’s great for people to be able to easily enter/exit a station, and in theory you are supposed to not have to pay a penalty fare. But at least for Oyster (as of a while ago) in practice that assumes that you revisit that station at another occation when the ticket barriers are in normal operation.
Also the fact that the only available customer service for Oyster is via phone makes things complicated for visitors. Especially since Brexit it might not be an easy decision for a foreigner to know if it’s even worth roaming fees to contact the Oyster customer service. If this had been how customer service was in a shop that sells consumer goods I would think it would be illegal.
Btw, as I understand it one of the arguments for giving travellers incentive to switch from travel cards to pay-as-you-go was to reduce overcrowding. Is this reason still valid?
Btw, given that people pay others to do simple task like cleaning their house, isn’t it reasonable to argue that for at least some it might also be worth paying a for not having to keep track of correct touch-in, touch-out and route validation? For some reason it seems like the general opinion is to think that people who pay extra to avoid what could be considered “adminstrative tasks” are idiots.
Re the undated Oval map. The first place I saw this was in the DfT’s “Pay-as-you-go on rail” consultation in 2019 – https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/pay-as-you-go-on-rail
As well as a few different maps the document also mentions the fares changes that’ll need to be made to support PAYG, e.g. a return is twice the cost of a single.
I can’t say I’ve noticed “the standard of comfort in Standard Class rising over the years”. On local trains I’d say it’s more a case of First Class coming down to meet it(as highlighted in the article) while on what were previously known as Inter-City services seats have been squeezed in ever closer over the years.
Very pickky technical point – “active ticket gates when presented with a valid QR code displayed on a phone” is unconnected. The codes used for railway tickets are not QR codes. QR codes have “timing squares” in three corners of the 2D barcode and the National Rail tickets are Aztec format.
[Point Taken. Changed to 2D barcode. PoP]
For what it’s worth I’ve long thought that the current system of ticketing should be replaced by a system where the user is charged on a “radial distance” (“as the crow flies”) basis and have per-km rates that have a premium for the fastest non-stopping trains and a lowest rate for the slowest trains with the longest dwell times. So 300km/h trains are more expensive than 200k/h and so on in bands.
This would allow users of fast trains that are delayed to automatically pick up the lower fair levels and provide “automatic” compensation for trips where an interconnection is missed.
This would also allow for multi-point trips to be dealt with, which is perfectly possible within the TfL system but almost impossible with RDG-based services. Each user of the system could have their personal travel zones calculated and use the 3.6x2xsingle fare used automatically as a fare cap.
Discounts (for age or time Network-cards) could be given based on the user linking their entitlement to their contactless or “smart” card.
@MiaM
You make a good point about “penalty fares anxiety”.
This is a problem with PAYG and smartcards versus paper tickets which comes down to enforcement; if a ticket inspector on a train or at a destination finds a passenger with an invalid paper ticket, they can be caught out and fined. If however they touched in somewhere with no intention of touching out at their unstaffed destination, there’s no way of catching them.
Perhaps there’s a case for a special visitor Oyster card limited to a fixed number of days/zones with no penalty fares as long as the card has zero PAYG balance and is thus definitively not valid outside the days/zones already paid for. I can’t see TfL or DfT being keen on this idea though.
@Brian Butterworth:
On the other hand, the fastest trains are also the cheapest to operate when it comes to moving a specific amount of passengers from A to B.
So a premium for faster trains might be a great idea for for example the future HS2, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s a bad idea to for example charge more for travelling on the fast / semi-fast Metropolitan underground trains, or for that sake charge more for travelling on the Picadilly line than the District line along their shared lines.
@Paul:
Great point about not touching out!
A possible mitigation would be to change so that an invalid touch in / out is charged as a regular trip on the farthest distance possible from the origin station to the first point that you would have to either pass a ticket barrier or for some reason is required to touch any other reader (say for example route validators at an open interchange between different services). Sure, this wouldn’t be great but would at least be better than nothing.
Another option would be to change “pay as you go” to “pay as you come” for trips outside a certain area, say for example from inside zone 1-6 to outside zone 6. I.e. if you intend to travel outsize zone 6 you would need to use some type of special reader where you would just touch the destination station on a map on a touch screen, or touch the name in a list of station (or something similar) and then touch your card.
Other possible option would be to store one or two standard trips on your card, and those trips would automatically be the default trip if you miss touching out. Sure, for someone living in Brighton it might be really bad if they are accidentally charged for going home from London when they are travelling between two stations within London, but at least this would reduce the problem for most travellers.
P.S. “penalty fares anxiety” is a great way to describe the problem!
As a former rail commuter from Northampton to London both pre and post Covid a couple of thoughts:
Pre-Covid: in London pretty much every day: buy season, ticket begrudge how much it cost, but always travel standard class on whatever trains made most sense that day (even if it turned out to be made up of the horrid and cramped 2+3 seating that LNWR use on some of their trains)
Post Covid: Only in a couple of days a week: buy tickets in advance (often as much as a month) for days I know I needed to be in London, but buying single tickets. Often this meant that the single First Class fare to London was cheaper or only £1.50 ish more expensive than standard – which is an acceptable premium to avoid the possibility of the 2+3’s Plus you get a plug for your laptop and enough space to actually use it in an airline style seat.
On the way home I couldn’t predict a month in advance when I’ll be done with work and able to get on a train but a Network Railcard saved me a bunch on walk up singles.
The problem with that set up is I can’t freely change my tickets if my plans need to change last minute, and walk up fares in the morning are crushingly expensive if I suddenly need to go to the office.
Plus in the past year, many, many train strikes. Which eventually led me to have to test driving at least part way.
And it turns out that whilst it’s a massive pain, E.g. I have to leave earlier, the experience isn’t as bad as I’d feared and whilst it would be too tiring to do everyday, twice a week is manageable and the total journey cost (given I I’ve already paid for the car) is approx. 30% cheaper than getting the train.
So now I don’t. And environmentally I hate it, but I’d rather have the money to feed and house my kids.
I know NMP is outside the Oval scope but based on my experience of seeing the same faces on the platform there’s still is (was?) a pretty sizeable potential commuter community that isn’t dealt with here. I’d love and would use a sensibly priced carnet or similar ticket that was based on a number of journeys but it has to be based off the right comparison ticket. Offering a (small) discount off walk up return tickets doesn’t reflect how regular commuters this far out buy tickets.
Yes I know it’s complicated, but feels like DFT are trying to operate in a vacuum where no such vacuum exists, people have more options now.
Side track re 2+3 seating and whatnot:
Does all stock have the same loading gauge in the UK, or do some likes have wider stock?
Afaik the GCR were built with a larger loading gauge. Is this still kept and if so does it apply to the full Chiltern network? If so it might be worth getting wider trains.
Even though the trains look a bit weird it’s IMHO absolutely worth having trains that are way wider above platform level than at/below platform level. I’d say that the 2+3 seating in the Regina/X50-X53 trains in Sweden is as roomy as 2+2 seating in most other trains: The extreme is the S-trains in Copenhagen with 3+3 seating with a really wide over hang over the platforms.
Sure, it wouldn’t help travellers on other lines to know that travellers on Chiltern have roomier trains, but it would probably be a good idea and an incentive to long term future proof new/rebuilt lines with wider loading gauge so that eventually more lines can have wider trains.
I appreciate that this is an article on rail ticketing, but a significant benefit of London’s ticketing (but not fare) system is that it is mode neutral. Project Oval extends contactless to feeder rail lines (as exists on GWR, including Windsor & Eton Central in addition to those mentioned in the article) – what about, for example, extending the multi-modal concept to feeder (and other) bus routes, or park n ride?
I suspect that many people assumed that we needed ‘peak’ travel rates to pay for low remuneration rolling stock and facilities (e.g. expensive rolling stock idle during the day not earning money) or else to deter people from travelling at certain times in case facilities might get overloaded and additional ones required. Now that in many cases the peak does not exist in terms of passenger numbers, it seems that these exorbitant fares are applied merely to penalise people who have the audacity to need to travel at certain times of the day without a season or advance-purchase ticket, even when the train is full of empty seats [peak, off peak and super off-peak are utterly meaningless for my journey from Walton-on-the-Naze to Hythe now that we have five coach trains.] The old ways of gouging passengers who turn up and expect to travel without following arbitrary rules and principles seem to be well-and-truly busted, they are voting with their feet, so we really only have two options for much of the country, Beeching 2 or else more subsidy.
MiaM
Most UK trains are quite narrow and its only the subsurface trains on London’s underground that are any wider. The Met’s A60/62 stock were considered the widest passenger trains in the UK – that’s a good 10 inches more than much of Chiltern’s offerings. Even the current S7/S8 stock is almost as wide as the A60/62. Marylebone’s current platform configuration would likely preclude any possibility of wider trains being used.
@Betterbee London ticketing isn’t quite mode neutral (would be nice if it truly was).
Hopper fares only cover multiple bus journeys within the hour (and there would be benefit to the customer if they would support multimodal travel, especially in outer zones, and particularly to enhance usefulness of forthcoming superloop).
Also sometimes the fares will vary based on whether a tube (incl. TfL train) was used vs rail (different fare scales in the Oyster system, see oysterfares website for details, and this most obviously impacts journeys which you have avoided Zone 1 and touched a pink validator, or where customer has a choice of nearby stations, tube vs rail, for fundamentally the same journey),
One (hopefully short-lived) recent ticket innovation that you didn’t mention is Southeastern’s Flexi season – https://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk/tickets/tickets-explained/flexi-season-tickets
It is effectively a carnet of 8 day tickets that can be used in a 28 day period. It’s ideal if you need exactly this many tickets over a four week period (i.e. a fixed 2 commuting days per week), but with any more or less days travel it is no longer the cheapest option. I don’t think they could have made it much less flexible or useful if they had tried!
In principle it could have been good, but the pricing and inflexibility (why not made it 8 tickets over 56 or 90 days?) makes it a non-starter for many people. I wonder if there are many regular users of this ticket type?
@Jim Hughes
Probably targeted to workers that have to be in the office two days a week.
Miles: London’s ticketing is already mode neutral – you can use Oyster/contactless on anything.
As you say, fares are anything but, with a dozen varieties of farescale on trains, and buses/trams completely different. Multimodality would indeed be good, and it looks to me as if the essence of the necessary ticketing infrastructure is already there.
Jim & LBM
8 days in 28 could work quite well if you needed to be in 3 days a week…
I did read somewhere that this was the most common arrangement.
Isn’t the charge for failure to touch out set at a level broadly equivalent to the highest single fare?
If the principle is extended across the wider Project Oval network, then the charge from Brighton could be as much as £56, based on the fare for travel to Bedford (no need to pass through any other barriers en route) or £63 to Milton Keynes. That is somewhat punitive if the failure to touch out is because your card has not registered on the reader at Preston Park.
@Betterbee Covering strictly the “ticket element, yes Contactless is more fully mode neutral for ticketing.
Oyster isn’t quite.
There are a few rail destinations that are “London”, have TfL compatible contactless gates, but don’t accept Oyster (due to the technical restrictions of Oyster card-max 15/16 zones possible4 binary bits available –2 to power 4; and all are now in use).
Also there are a few non-TfL buses that run inside London boundaries (e.g. Uno in the far north west) that now accept contactless (and also ENCTS) but not Oyster (in all forms e.g, Zip ,Freedom Pass–unless the freedom pass it has ENCTS marking because holder is eligible for that scheme)
I am bemused by the comments about the difficulty of purchasing ‘boundary zone X’ add-on tickets. The SWR machines at Waterloo seem very happy to sell me (a London Freedom Pass and Senior railcard holder) heavily discounted ‘evening out’ boundary Zone 6 to Farncombe cheap day returns from mid-afternoon, for example. If I need a single in the other direction after 09:30, I simply book to Surbiton. Indeed, when I asked for a boundary Zone 6 ticket at the (very briefly staffed) Farncombe booking office, I was given a ticket to… Surbiton! Is this flexibility unique to SWR? If so, shouldn’t other TOCs in the old Network SouthEast area be obliged to replicate it?
LBM & Chris,
I can see the intent, but for my route if one needed to travel for 7 or 9 days in 28, then other options are cheaper; for 3 days/week it’s cheaper to buy a monthly season, and for 7 days in 28 daily tickets are cheaper.
Even if someone worked 2 days a week, with holiday, sickness, bank holidays etc they are unlikely to consistently hit the sweet spot where this ticket makes sense.
A couple of points:
– GWR have recently stopped selling Boundary tickets from their machines at Paddington station (different supplier and different machines).
– My recollection is that Chiltern removed First Class some time after privatisation (maybe 20 years ago).
There was a time, when one could upgrade to FIRST CLASS, by simply paying the fare-difference up-front.
But that is no longer allowed.
So, why bother, put up with the cattle trucks – incidentally – “been there, done that” …
There are times, when the fare-differntial was & is worth it, if you can do it.
To those of us with longer memories… “Pullman Second Class was wonderful money-saver for travelling in real comfort!
Greg T,
And that raises another point I omitted to include in the article.
Segregated travel only really works if you have a guard or other person regularly checking tickets or at least walking up and down the train. Having First Class travel in trains with only a driver makes very little sense. One consequence of this is, as you mention, there is no longer an option to simply pay the difference when in your seat.
It was different in ‘the old days’. Tickets were checked on the train. Potential fare evaders sitting in First Class often stood out. Society was was much more compliant with rules and the societal disapproval for breaking them was greater. Also, sitting in a First Class compartment meant you couldn’t see if the ticket examiner was making his way down the train! And, I suspect, as a general rule, those that could afford First Class were happy to pay the extra and many who might have chanced it wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting in the company of First Class passengers anyway.
There are many reasons for removing the ability to upgrade on the train but the obvious one is it would simply encourage no-one to pay First Class in advance and upgrade on the rare occasions they got caught. As ticket checks become more and more based on origin and destination checks not on-board checks, First Class makes little sense other than on services where tickets can realistically be checked on practically every journey.. To me, having First Class travel on Thameslink is a complete nonsense. On other services it only works if staff conscientiously check the tickets. If they are going to continue to have First Class on other than prestige long-distance routes they really need to have an on-board technical solution to ensure they genuinely pick-up significant First Class revenue.
The writer is correct to point out that the Freedom Pass is not catered for in online booking for mainline journeys, whereas the Senior Railcard is. If the nation goes fully PAYG via a bank card or smartphone, one logical enhancement would be to allow users to add their Freedom Passes and Railcards to their payment cards and let the big computer in the sky take the strain.
@QQ Bollard
One does indeed wonder why railcards and passes can’t be linked with a specific payment card like they can be loaded onto an Oyster-format card. There must be specific technical and/or regulatory barriers to this.
On the basis of previous reports, it’s likely that someone, somewhere is considering all of this including child fares. It seems to me that it’s not really a sensible option to issue young children with payment cards, so some sort of smart card scheme will need to be retained for them if no-one else. Or of course, free travel for under 11s could be extended to a wider area, perhaps the whole country, but I can’t see the DfT being keen!
Paul:
Re regulatory barrier, perhaps the problem is that it’s hard to make sure that any non-transport bank card readers can’t tell if a bank card has a disability freedom pass attached to it?
Re children – technically they could have something that is a full payment card but with very limited validity, possibly only valid on transit.
Btw, at what age does kids start to get annoying to strangers when they aren’t accompanied by an adult? I have a gut felling that even ten year olds being able to ride all trains for free would result in them taking the train back and forth and possibly being annoying to other passengers, if only by just being kids (i.e. running around and being somewhat loud).
If the requirement is that kids need to travel with an adult then it could simply be a matter of having different adult ticket prices depending on how many children, if any, the ticket should also be valid for. Technically it could function the same way as when you select first or second class when buying a ticket.
================
Btw, re disability freedom passes:
It’s IMHO kind of annoying that various regulations that give exemptions or price reductions for certain groups rarely are valid across various boundaries. In most cases senior discounts are valid just by showing a valid ID card (or obviously looking like you are 80+ years old, perhaps). But I have never even heard of a case where you can use proof of disability from one country to gain access to disability discounts in another country.
(I know that UK isn’t part of EU any more, but an example of another regulation that differs and causes trouble for a small number of people is that in Sweden any car that is 30 years old or older are automatically considered a veteran/antique vehicle and is exempt from tax and the very few low emission zones. Meanwhile in Germany there are similar rules but there you have to go through an approval process and show that you veteran car follows certain standards (seems like it has to be the way grumpy old men want their vintage stuff, i.e. a well polished brand new looking car rather than a car that looks like it’s actually been in use and perhaps has some period correct modifications) to be eligible for tax reduction/exemption and also exemption from the low emission zones. Sure, each country should have some autonomy. But the end result is that if someone from Germany want to drive their vintage car in a low emission zone in Sweden, they are allowed to do so just due to the car being old, while if someone from Sweden want to drive their car in a low emission zone in Germany, they have to apply for membership in a specific veteran car club and pay fees and send in some documentation and whatnot to get a certificate that your car is indeed a vintage car. The end result is kind of that Germany still get pollution from vintage two stroke Trabants in low emission zones while they keep out vintage four stroke cars from other countries.
To get slightly more on topic again, it seems like in some cases things are getting better. It seems like there is an international student card that at least in some places are vaild for train ticket discounts.
@Paul Yes there is a reason why it’s difficult to link railcards/passes etc. to a payment card.
PCI-DSS regulations mean that companies that operate systems which process payment cards have to be very careful on the design of IT systems, including storing card details. This is to avoid accidental disclosure of card details to fraudsters (malfeasance by employees and external criminals)
This makes the design and implementation of a scheme to link railcards to payment cards more complex and costly, and also increases operational costs (ongoing technical audits). It’s not impossible (technically maybe using a “one way durable token” as a proxy to card number), but would have a wide impact.
Better approaches that storing payment card numbers
1/ TfL in association with Rail Delivery Group could issue a limited use payment card to RailCard holders, and that card links to a real bank account (similar to the citymapper card, and also NFC enabled “payment jewellery” like the McClear ring). Card only works on TfL/project Oval gates. The card number range could trigger the concessionary discount. This is quite costly, and realistically would need cards that are valid for 3 years (you can get a 3 year Family Railcard, in principle other railcards could be 3 years with some caveats).
2/ .Option 1 could be implemented as a Railcard app or extension to TfL go. Virtual card number on the phone that triggers discounts, similar to mobile phone wallets like Apple Pay
3/ Issue railcards on ITSO/Oyster compatible cards, which can be topped up/linked to bank accounts (Noted that TfL can already set concessionary discount flag with end date on Oyster for people who hold e.g. Disabled/Senior railcards.
Options 1&2 are ultimately more flexible (covering contactless but not Oyster stations)
Since this problem can’t be unique to the London / South East UK area, I would think that this would be something that should and could be worked on in cooperation with other public transport agencies more or less worldwide.
Re one way token: Does the RFID part of a payment card contain a longer card ID than the printed number of the card? If it is the same length (even including the expiration information and whatnot) then I don’t think a one way token would work as it wouldn’t be hard for criminals to generate a table for all possible payment card numbers or run a brute force attack.
@MaiM One way (non reversible) durable cryptographic tokenisation of the main 16 digit card number plus expiry date is the standard solution to card number protection in customer-facing systems. The token is also held secure, the key is usually unique to the retailer, and plaintexts (full card numbers) must not be stored by the organisation requesting payment from customer (only the payment services provider who also provides the tokenisation code knows both). CVV also must not be stored (generally re-entered every time by customer although use of CVV is optional especially for ongoing repeated payments, affecting the payment risk profile).
So brute force decrypts are generally considered unfeasible (would need a payment provider or acquiring bank to be compromised), and the risk is managed accordingly. There is an already existing weak spot–link from contactless pad on gateline back to the front line of systems which capture the use of the card and presumably will be tokenising the card details embedded in the NFC data interchanged between card (or phone) and gateline equipment.
A customer’s account can store the token for repeated use and could therefore be used to associate to a railcard. Making this work end to end in a timely way is complex and therefore I suspect TfL can’t find a business case for the investment (especially since it will tend to reduce revenue–not a great moral position for a public authority since it is not minimising the cost to the user, but there you are)
If you include the station/gateline ID* into the one-way hash that would certainly make it harder to break.
Obviously you then need multiple hashes per card – one for each station/gateline where the card is valid.
To reduce the count to a reasonable level zone-based tickets would use a ZoneID instead. When touching this means the gate needs to try several hashes, one with it’s own ID, one with the Zone ID, etc.
But honestly, looking up hashes isn’t particularly slow. Generating and looking up a dozen hashes in well under a second shouldn’t be an issue.
The main drawback is it would require all gatelines to be connected to the cloud or a central server. Which I believe is not currently the case (and the reason why you have to nominate a station to collect your oyster ticket from)
* these IDs should be non-sequential and from a number of possibilities far larger than the total number of gatelines. Otherwise building rainbow tables would be too easy.
I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention TfL’s proposal to withdraw from One day Travelcards, which will have a significant impact on fares in the London area, especially out-boundary.
An article and comments which left me feeling like I was a very odd person in the past. For many years I effectively lived on the Euston lines, commuting from Watford (usu Junction) and Leighton Buzzard into central London for work, but also often making a second return journey most evenings and weekends for social purposes. These were effectively ‘free’ trips. Have such season-but-social trips disappeared post covid?
@MilesT – pre-Covid there were multiple commitments (or at least strong hints) made by TfL in response to GLA questions to enable discount Railcards or entitlements to be associated with Contactless cards in addition to Oyster, and this is surely the major remaining barrier to withdrawing Oyster altogether – something I understood to be the long term ambition of TfL and maybe a net positive in terms of financial impact? Surely this needs to be resolved before Project Oval lands, as requiring paper tickets for discounted travel seems like a political no-go.
The big benefit for me would be to get the correct fare with my SwatchPAY not-so-smart-but-very-useful watch at readers – I really hate fumbling around for an Oyster card from my wallet! As a related question, how would Tokenisation work where the payment device (SwatchPAY, McClear Ring, Apple / Google Pay etc.) is itself Tokenised and/or abstracted via something like Curve – would you need to register each Tokenised or Virtual card number? I guess yes for any Virtual card numbers, but what about the Tokenised devices?
Is it OK to mention the https://gbrtt.co.uk/ Great British Railways Transition Team?
It would seem to fit into this article but seems to not get a mention. Just wondered why.
[Website not previously known about. But, in any case, I cannot see any references to fares or fare policy on it. Correct me if I am wrong. PoP]
See https://gbrtt.co.uk/what-we-do/our-workstreams/fares-ticketing-retail/, PoP.
Re season tickets, I always thought that in the UK these were too high. You mention 3.6x the daily rate. In Germany in the late 1990s the official recommendation by VDV, the PT authorities and operators association, was 2.77-3.46(specifically, 12-15x the daily rate for subscription-based monthly ticket).
I also find the DfT’s obsession with contactless weird given their high costs compared to seasons.
And finally, when discussing rail tickeing in a post-covid world, I wonder if it would be worth mentioning the German 49-Euro-Ticket? That started on 1 May, and on 9 May VDV said that 2 Million new tickets have been sold (ie in addition to the 11.6 million previous PT season ticket holders). So despite an huge increase in home working over there too, there are now substantially more season ticket holders than ever before…
Christian: Also worth mentioning is the open ticket barriers in Germany. That makes it possible to have all kinds of physical and electronic tickets without needing a way to read the tickets at ticket barriers.
Btw I think that the 49-Euro-ticket is great for tourism outside the largest cities. Although it is rather different from the “Weltmeisterinnen” ticket in 2011, I can attest that the availability of a decently cheap country wide ticket was that made me select Germany rather than any other place for vacation that year, and also made me visit other places than Berlin and Hamburg which are the only two cities that I have been on vacation at as a destination rather than at most just a shorter stop along the route to/from elsewhere.
I would think that it also makes some Germans do tourism within Germany rather than going to other countries.
Is it ok to say Great British Railways (GBR) may not arrive anytime soon. Sunak is not allowing legislation time to proceed.
[I will run a link on’t in Monday’s Friday Reads, all comments regarding this should be held until that post is published. LBM]
@MilesT
Surely, given that one can register any payment card with TfL and examine journey history and costs online or via their app, the necessary tokenisation must be being done already? I can open the app, see my costs, see that they’re all via the same card/device, so linking and applying a discount would seem to be trivial?
As for why they’d want to do it, well I can see significant savings in any future retirement of the Oyster system. Though clearly there are child fares, freedom passes and other things to deal with as well.
@MiaM
In London children can have their zip card revoked if they don’t follow a code of conduct. This applies also to 11-16 year olds who get free bus travel. Bad behaviour does occur, particularly with older children on buses, but it is pretty rare in my experience.
I’m sad to discover that antimassacar is actually spelt antimacassar.
[I’m sad to discover that the spellchecker didn’t flag this as a spelling error. Now corrected. Thanks. PoP]
Given that Macassar oil has long since been supplanted as a treatment for gentlemen’s hair, why antimacassar still seen as necessary on trains? There’s at least a century out-of-date.
The DfT has announced this morning the 53 Project Oval Phase 1 stations that are to be added to PAYG by the end of the year:
– all c2c (15)
– to Sevenoaks both ways (6)
– to Shepperton (4)
– to Windsor & Eton Riverside / Virginia Water (8)
– to High Wycombe (6)
– to Bletchley (8)
– Abbey line (6)
Si
Shepperton
The perpetual pain in the posterior.
Why ( Oh why, oh why, etc ) it isn’t on the Oyster/Travelcard zones { In Zone 7, natch } has been a moan & discussion-point for many years, now.
Incidentally, IF one wants o use a credit/debit card for theses “touch-&-bleep” transactions …
Can one simply start using one’s card, or do you have to register somewhere, somehow?
Greg T,
Why ( Oh why, oh why, etc ) it isn’t on the Oyster/Travelcard zones { In Zone 7, natch } has been a moan & discussion-point for many years, now.
I think one of the reasons was SWT/SWR would perceive it losing revenue but with the current government support scheme this would be irrelevant.
I think a bigger issue is that just having zones going further and further out is regarded as being less satisfactory than in the centre. In particular, if not administered in one go as a complete circle then you will get loads of fares anomalies. If taken to extremes, would it really be right that Brighton – London costs the same as Brighton – Bedford ?
Of course, we have the glorious anomaly of Tattenham Corner and Caterham being in zone 6. However, this was done because passenger numbers were so low, it was not thought worth bothering with the additional revenue obtained by having them in a ‘Shepperton’ situation. This means in the past I have often used my Over 60 pass to travel from Chipstead to Tadworth for free which is a journey entirely outside the GLA boundary.
Incidentally, IF one wants o use a credit/debit card for theses “touch-&-bleep” transactions …
Can one simply start using one’s card, or do you have to register somewhere, somehow?
I have made morning peak journeys from Purley to Bourne End. You simply touch in and touch out with your debit/credit card. If you link your credit card to your Oyster account you have a record of the transaction but there is absolutely no need to register.
Credit/debit just works (mostly) some international cards may not be recognised. Each charge will appear on your card account.
To obtain details of the journey as a receipt and statement you need to register with the TfL site. No Oyster account is needed though if you already have one you can link them. Registering also makes it easier to obtain refunds and challenge charges.