What is the percentage of customers on a daily basis who queue for 5 minutes and have the ticket rejected? And what percentage of those never use a train again?
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There's to be no standing on the platform
- Thread starter oldman
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What is the percentage of customers on a daily basis who queue for 5 minutes and have the ticket rejected? And what percentage of those never use a train again?
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If someone has done some research on this please point me in the right direction. But at any busy station queues form at gatelines quite often, I bet if people didn't have tickets rejected quite so often the queues would be much smaller. What you don't seem to understand is that the problem applies mostly to people who aren't regular travellers, yes people who use the system daily will have these issues but the people affected by them most are the 'could be' customers, those who may use rail more, but experience these bad journeys.
The idea that barrier should systematically reject valid tickets because they can't check them fully(e.g. railcard discount) is ridiculous, I'm all for ticket barriers and good revenue protection but if they can't get barriers to let through valid tickets and reject invalid ones they should probably not use them, save for the busiest stations where they can afford a handful of manual barriers.
So basically you have no evidence to prove that the rail industry is losing customers because of the inability to have their ticket checked by a machine which scans them. ? As was already stated earlier, there is a requirement to manually check discount cards for vaildity.....and with very good reason as there is a known problem with passengers attempting to use cards that are out of date. I happen to be based at a mainline station though I dont check tickets on the gates.....however the very topic of out of date railcards came up in a briefing I attended with gateline staff earlier on this week.
Well, it didn't put me off travel but when I wanted to go home with my family in the evening peak at King's Cross, our valid off-peak tickets were rejected (despite being valid in the evening peak). Again, this is down to the encoding on the ticket and the ability for the gates to properly confirm what is and isn't valid at certain times of the day.
The man at the gate, agency staff from East Coast, wouldn't let us pass and ultimately we missed TWO trains as a result (thanks to the way they're timetabled).
I am sure such a situation would put some people off if they had an alternative method of travel that wasn't too much of an inconvenience, or the journey wasn't absolutely necessary.
The yellow box on the wall telephones the station supervisor in the office round the corner rather than someone miles away with that particular system - I believe yellow boxes are local help points which will call the station and white ones are ones that call the control rooms though I may be wrong!
Obviously not judging by the fact that rail passengers are now at their highest ever recorded figure and still growing. Clearly the fact that occassionally issues occur at gatelines is no deterent to passengers using the railway.
Baxenden Bank
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Or growth would have been even greater had some passengers not been deterred?
On that matter, well off topic but never mind, has the growth in passengers been accompanied by a similar growth in revenue? Encouraging more passengers for lower revenue is not a recipe for business success. Mmmm, how many TOC's are on revenue support despite the record number of passengers?
Even further off topic, should there be a warning, when advertsing / purchasing a YP railcard (or similar) stating that 'your tickets will be programmed to fail at ticket barriers because the rail industry regards all passengers as potential criminals until they have proven their innocence'?
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I think there should be some form of warning, my suggestion would be having signs above the barriers to the effect of 'Peak & Off Peak Tickets ONLY' above electronic barriers and then a manual barrier at the end with 'Railcard Holders' etc to direct people.
Ergo, the number of passengers inconvenienced by poorly programmed barriers has grown and is still growing.
Occasionally? Every time I buy onboard on my local branch line, the Avantix issued tickets fail to work the barriers at the major station at the end of this branch. Every time I travel on a Rover or Ranger type ticket I have to use the manual gate, which often entails a delay of some kind.
My regular delays at gatelines:
- Waiting for the member of staff to finish dealing with another passenger who also has a ticket that fails to work
- Being told to try the ticket in the barrier again by obstreporous staff who won't take your word that it just failed to work
- Having to wait for a reply from a remotely monitored gateline
- At a remotely monitored gateline, being told my ticket isn't valid when it is and being forced to come to the main entrance
Well they ARE potential criminals and the checks often uncover a large number of users who haven't got a railcard with them. Those who check out okay are let out with a 'thanks' or 'cheers' and I doubt any of them get angry over it.
Therefore it's perfectly valid to have a check in place (by programming the gates accordingly), so perhaps having posters guiding those with discounted tickets to use a certain gate and have the necessary railcards ready for inspection.
There's no need to use emotive terms about potential criminals then. Any more than every single passenger that is a potential criminal by possibly doing any number of things in breach of a byelaw etc.
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I've commented upon the staff at Blackpool North previously on another thread.
I've stayed there again whilst doing a NW Rover and the experience was similar. The gateline staff went out of their way to not see me when the barriers refuse the ticket and then when eventually deigning to acknowledge my presence berating me for wanting 'special service'! ie letting me through on a valid ticket.
On one morning (first visit), the doors onto the platform were opened one minute before departure. The first person in line was in a wheelchair. The staff had been through the door and back several times, so were fully aware that a wheelchair user was boarding. They let the chair and accompanying pax through, reshut the gate and spent several minutes getting the ramp and loading the wheelchair. About 4 mins after booked departure time, they finally let everyone else board (enough to fully load a 156). Departure was inevitably several minutes late.
As for rovers not operating barriers, why did my NW rover work on the barriers at Leeds? I was quite surprised when I was let through. It's about the only time I've had a 'proper' rover work a barrier. Most daytripper/dayranger tickets seem to work OK though.
The best bit of Blackpool - get the tram to Fleetwood on market day...
Blackpool Tower used to be well worth a visit, but not now. It's rubbish and horrendously overpriced.
I've stayed there again whilst doing a NW Rover and the experience was similar. The gateline staff went out of their way to not see me when the barriers refuse the ticket and then when eventually deigning to acknowledge my presence berating me for wanting 'special service'! ie letting me through on a valid ticket.
On one morning (first visit), the doors onto the platform were opened one minute before departure. The first person in line was in a wheelchair. The staff had been through the door and back several times, so were fully aware that a wheelchair user was boarding. They let the chair and accompanying pax through, reshut the gate and spent several minutes getting the ramp and loading the wheelchair. About 4 mins after booked departure time, they finally let everyone else board (enough to fully load a 156). Departure was inevitably several minutes late.
As for rovers not operating barriers, why did my NW rover work on the barriers at Leeds? I was quite surprised when I was let through. It's about the only time I've had a 'proper' rover work a barrier. Most daytripper/dayranger tickets seem to work OK though.
The best bit of Blackpool - get the tram to Fleetwood on market day...
Blackpool Tower used to be well worth a visit, but not now. It's rubbish and horrendously overpriced.
CaptainHaddock
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We should arrange a mass "Wandering up and down the platforms" trip to Blackpool North. Imagine how the station staff would react if they saw 40-50 people individually walking wherever they choose on each platform!
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Even more interesting would be what happens if/when it becomes public knowledge that Disabled Railcard holders (who don't forget may have a disability that isn't obvious to casual view) or for that matter Senior Railcard holders are being routinely treated as if they might be potential criminals. In the first case it's probably illegal, in the second politically unacceptable. The DfT will hang TOCs responsible out to dry to avoid the muck sticking to themselves, and the TOCs will scapegoat IT staff and barrier line staff in the same way.
Of course coming back to topic, the staff at Blackpool North treat everyone as if they are potential criminals or violent drunks, and have done for the last 40 years at least.
kevconnor
Member
It's just basic logic. It's reasonable to assume that a fairly constant portion of tickets get rejected, assuming the number of passengers isn't increasing due to something that affects the rejection rate(i.e. new discount railcard) then more passengers means more rejections at gatelines.
No it doesnt.....and here is why.....having an IT background myself prior to joining the railway, I found myself some years ago involved in a project investigating large amounts of " alien " slips ( in effect the same as rejected tickets at gateline ) on the back of an EPOS system newly installed in a nationwide chain of bookmakers. The results from the project once we had investigated using " root cause analysis " techniques resulted in a 90% reduction in rejections. The picture being painted by a number of forumites is that barriers are a waste of time and they fail to work. I m sorry but that is absolute and complete nonsense......if they were so bad then they wouldnt be installed in the first place, and as I have pointed out time and time again, nothing makes it to the coalface in this industry without rigorous testing and appraisal. Whilst I know that there are rejections, a common cause is that the magnetic strip has corruption.......
So the magnetic strip has corruption...forgive me for thinking that would mean the system fails to work! I can see that rejecting discounted tickets for checking railcards will increase revenue. However as you say a common cause is the tickets just stop working of their own accord, causing inconvenience to the passengers, shouldn't this have come up in the rigorous testing? I don't think barriers are a waste of time, but I think they could have been done a lot better!
Baxenden Bank
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Which is absolutely no different from the likes of cashpoints and in store visa machines failing to work because a bank card has corruption or some sort of flaw with its chip.....and in fact I saw a first class example of this the other day whilst i was working. A TVM on a station ( which just so happened to be about 10 foot away from the train I was working ) retained a card which resulted in the passenger having no ticket. The passenger freely admitted that card had a little damage....the machine did exactly what it was supposed to do and clamped it.
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