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• Google Street View has added London’s tube stations to its maps (Ian Visits)
• Prosecuting passengers for pocket change? Rail ticketing in Britain is an absolute farce (The Guardian)
• Amtrak sets ridership & ticket revenue records in FY24 (Smart Cities Dive)
• New network of metro lines inaugurated in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Urban Transport)
• Secret Metro Station of Bucharest (Young Pioneers)
• Enthusiasts help Northampton railway worker’s ticket project (BBC News)
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Jonn Elledge does that very Guardian thing of accurately describing the sorry state of something, whilst simultaneously glossing over many of the hard truths and trade-offs involved in solving it.
Yes it feels unfair when someone makes a genuine mistake because of system complexity and ends up in court; but the counter-factual is that if they make a genuine mistake and there are no real consequences, they might be tempted to keep making the same mistake and exploiting the ongoing loophole of forgiveness. £1.26 isn’t much for one journey, but if it’s a regular one that could amount to hundreds of pounds a year. They might also be tempted to post online that whatever rule this is never really gets enforced, and if you’re unlucky enough to get challenged all you have to do is say this certain set of things and you’ll be let off with just paying the difference.
The core point is sound – the system is too complex and requires simplifcation. Yet this also requires some hard decisions – for example if we abolished railcards that would immediately make the system simpler, but I don’t think that would be very popular.
So what trade-offs, what sacrifices are we willing to make for the simplicity everyone craves? Because there will have to be some. Abolishing Off-peak fares for long distance services, perhaps offset the impact by also abolishing the £10 fee for changing Advance tickets? Double down on PAYG for suburban/metro by eliminating paper and railcard validity? Replace universal point to point fares with multi-ticket journeys?
Re tickets, the Guardian article and whatnot:
Switching to electronic tickets in apps can at least make it very clear if a ticket is valid for a specific trip or not.
Or even just tell the app that you have a specific rail card and look up your trip, and it will tell if your card is valid or not.
But also: A very simple thing would be to require that a wording like “anytime” is illegal to use for tickets that actually are valid “sometimes”.
P.S. wasn’t the idea of hard ticket barriers that the barriers should ensure that passengers have valid tickets?
It seems to me one of the incredible weaknesses of the current system is that it has limited concept of time limitations. So, for example, a specific ticket for a specific trains seems to open the barriers at other times. I can see why there has to be some flexibility but I think it is perfectly possible to arrive at the destination station before you are supposed to have departed from the departure station. You can see the potential argument. “Well if it isn’t valid, why did the barriers let me through?”
I have had this legitimately work to my advantage. My Freedom Pass got checked on a Thameslink train (an extremely rare event!) before 9.30 a.m. on a Monday. I was told it wasn’t valid before 9.30 a.m. I replied that it was a bank holiday and if it wasn’t valid the barriers wouldn’t have let me enter the station at Purley. End of argument.