Increase of TfL Incomplete Journey Fare Trial

[Starmill]

They probably won't, but a sensible person should be keeping half an eye on their bank account or credit card statements and should see if something is out of the ordinary. If you were expecting to pay £15 and TfL have taken £35 you should notice that something has gone wrong, even if you don't know what or don't understand the technicalities.

If people aren't routinely checking their statements then that's on them, really.


If it is a genuine trial then there needs to be some sort of control, I suppose.

It depends. Does the traveller genuinely know what to expect? The single fare finder is often broken when I go to use it, and its results are often utterly bamboozling when it does work. It's not easy to find if you don't know it's there. And you won't find anything obvious calling out to it at a station.

Now, TfL have made some meaningful improvements by actually putting up a poster at many London Underground stations, but it's still not very noticeable and the fares info table is very small, I think it's titled "Common fares from this station". In the case of Greater Anglia stations, I've never seen such a poster anywhere - can anyone enlighten me as to if they have put some up? I saw one for Oyster cards vs Contactless which was incredibly confusing and difficult to read.

All it needs to get this right is some big banners on gatelines directing people to the single fare finder online, a callout to it in the TfL Go app, and some UI improvements, especially around the bizarre text about London Overground services that it throws out. I believe station staff on LU can use their ipad to check fares. Staff at rail companies really need to be properly briefed on using the fare finder too so that customers can ask if they're not online, this isn't that difficult to get right but a lot of TOCs have overlooked it.

It would take very little work to give the transparency required for someone to easily compare what they've been billed to what was due. The actually difficult part, installation of hardware and development of the backend, has all been done.

 

[Taunton]

If it is a genuine trial then there needs to be some sort of control, I suppose.

I presume "trial" is the same as "consultation", a weasel word to pretend some user input might take place, when in practice it's all been decided.

 

[Tetchytyke]

It depends. Does the traveller genuinely know what to expect?

Possibly not, but the trial seems to be designed to dramatically increase the maximum charge for not tapping in or out to try and dissuade people from "accidentally" forgetting to touch in or out in the shires.

The traveller may not know exactly what charge to expect, but if they were only travelling to zone 2 and they get charged £30+ they should know something has gone a bit awry.

And if they register their card they can log in and immediately see that there's an incomplete journey.

It would take very little work to give the transparency required for someone to easily compare what they've been billed to what was due.

I'd agree about the issues with fares transparency, though.

It's now so complex with Project Oval that, in quite a few cases, there is actually no way of knowing what you will be charged until you are charged. And, even then, it is often hard to calculate why you have been charged what you have been charged.

I've had a couple of instances where I've been charged less than I expected. TfL have applied a cap and reduced my fare but they don't actually say what cap(s) they've applied, just that they've applied one. I had one recently where I did two Z1-Z2 journeys then City Thameslink to Gatwick Airport and had a 30p saving applied through capping. I genuinely can't work out where it came from. It was in my favour so I'm not losing sleep over it, but still, there should be a way of knowing why they've applied a cap in the way they have.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 13 Jul 2026 ==

I presume "trial" is the same as "consultation", a weasel word to pretend some user input might take place, when in practice it's all been decided.

Oh, they know they want to increase the incomplete journey fare, the trial will be to make sure there are no unintended consequences.

 

[Benjwri]

I presume "trial" is the same as "consultation", a weasel word to pretend some user input might take place, when in practice it's all been decided.

Oh, they know they want to increase the incomplete journey fare, the trial will be to make sure there are no unintended consequences.

Which is exactly the same as a consultation. The point of these things is to listen and see if there are things they haven’t considered. They aren’t a public vote and they aren’t intended to be, people do not have a full objective view of things and will almost always choose what benefits them most without consideration of impact on others.

 

[Starmill]

Possibly not, but the trial seems to be designed to dramatically increase the maximum charge for not tapping in or out to try and dissuade people from "accidentally" forgetting to touch in or out in the shires.

The traveller may not know exactly what charge to expect, but if they were only travelling to zone 2 and they get charged £30+ they should know something has gone a bit awry.

And if they register their card they can log in and immediately see that there's an incomplete journey.

It isn't safe to just assume this at all. Regulars would know that absolutely. But regulars would be signed up online already so will see the problem regardless. Someone who isn't used to GBP for example may be clueless as to what the fare 'should' be. This is easy to remedy by obviously posting a list of prices for common journeys before the tap in points at main entrances, so people can have some kind of obvious reference point. Unfortunately no TOC does this, and it appears not to be on the radar. Unless someone can correct me there?

 

[Mattplans]

There's a sign at many (I want to say all?) ticket machines at any LO/LU/XR station entitled "Paying for your journey at this zone x station". I haven't had a detailed look (recently), but I'm pretty sure it includes the cost of travel (Contactless/Oyster/Tickets) from that station to any other zone1-8 station and details about capping and how to use oyster, etc.





Not sure/don't remember if they can be found at DLR stations; and they're definitely not present (no equivalent) at NR stations.
Having a hard time believing that stations don't display the PAYG fares for common journeys. Surely they must do or this is something they shoul dbe required to do.

 

[Russel]

At what cost though? We could never afford to gate and staff every station in even just the south.

Especially from first to last train.

Do we really need to man barrier from first to last train for tap on - tap off to work?

With enough announcements, signage etc, it would soon become second nature to tap out even if the barriers are open.

 

[Benjwri]

Do we really need to man barrier from first to last train for tap on - tap off to work?

With enough announcements, signage etc, it would soon become second nature to tap out even if the barriers are open.

No but the cost would still be prohibitive to do so, many stations have layouts that would make it extremely difficult. If they aren’t manned for long enough, and therefore left open, then you don’t solve the problem as people can still not tap in/out if the gates are open.

 

[MikeWh]

I've had a couple of instances where I've been charged less than I expected. TfL have applied a cap and reduced my fare but they don't actually say what cap(s) they've applied, just that they've applied one. I had one recently where I did two Z1-Z2 journeys then City Thameslink to Gatwick Airport and had a 30p saving applied through capping. I genuinely can't work out where it came from. It was in my favour so I'm not losing sleep over it, but still, there should be a way of knowing why they've applied a cap in the way they have.

If you detail the two z1-2 journeys I'll work it out. It's likely to be a zone 1-2 cap and an extension fare to Gatwick, not that those are properly publicised.

 

[Tetchytyke]

If you detail the two z1-2 journeys I'll work it out.

Thanks, it was St Pauls to Stratford and Stratford to St Pauls, both off-peak, followed by City Thameslink to Gatwick off-peak.

Is there actually a way of checking the extension fares? I've not been able to find one, the fares from Boundary Zone 2 to Gatwick on BRFares bear no resemblance to what I was charged. It seems to be far more secretive than it ought to be.

 

[signed]

Is there actually a way of checking the extension fares? I've not been able to find one, the fares from Boundary Zone 2 to Gatwick on BRFares bear no resemblance to what I was charged. It seems to be far more secretive than it ought to be.

No, they are kept private

FOI request detail

FOI request detail

tfl.gov.uk

And they find it would be too expensive to give them to the public (They quote £450 just to do some extraction from their fare software)

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.

We have estimated that it would cost over £450 to provide a response to your request. This is because it is estimated that it would take over 18 hours to retrieve and compile the information you have requested. The data you have requested is not held in a distinct, easily identifiable format. This data is constructed for use by our payments system. This dataset requires interaction between several files to produce the fare for a specific journey. Data relating to extension fares is embedded throughout these files. One file that could be used to develop this information has over 1,000,000 different origin / destination combinations. Each of those journeys then have associated fares according to passenger / discount type. A significant amount of time and work would be required to translate this data into a format that could be interpreted by any third party.


Please note that PAYG fares are the same whether you use contactless or an Oyster card.

 

[Edvid]

Is there actually a way of checking the extension fares? I've not been able to find one, the fares from Boundary Zone 2 to Gatwick on BRFares bear no resemblance to what I was charged. It seems to be far more secretive than it ought to be.

Not without a FoI request that TfL will (very reluctantly) fulfil after months of being chased, and even then the fare datasets will not include the station/zone pairings they represent unless the stations are outside the zones or on the edge of the outermost zone (which I converted from NLCs).

The linked documents were published last December so much of the information will now be out of date.

No, they are kept private

FOI request detail

FOI request detail

tfl.gov.uk

And they find it would be too expensive to give them to the public (They quote £450 just to do some extraction from their fare software)

See above.

 

[MikeWh]

Thanks, it was St Pauls to Stratford and Stratford to St Pauls, both off-peak, followed by City Thameslink to Gatwick off-peak.

Is there actually a way of checking the extension fares? I've not been able to find one, the fares from Boundary Zone 2 to Gatwick on BRFares bear no resemblance to what I was charged. It seems to be far more secretive than it ought to be.

That's crazy. It is very secretive because the bonkers cheap fare from East Croydon to Gatwick meant that the full fares were rarely being charged when CPAY was first introduced.

However, what fare were you charged overall? The individual fares are £3.10x2 plus £10.70 which is nowhere near the £24.10 off-peak cap at Gatwick. Were you charged £16.60?

 

[signed]

Not without a FoI request that TfL will (very reluctantly) fulfil after months of being chased, and even then the fare datasets will not include the station/zone pairings they represent unless the stations are outside the zones or on the edge of the outermost zone (which I converted from NLCs).

The linked documents were published last December so much of the information will now be out of date.

OT: I find the explaination laughable, if the file exists in text form and is even basic in structure, it wouldn't take long for someone that barely knows Python to some basic CSV parsing and be done with it in < 2h

 

[Adam Williams]

OT: I find the explaination laughable, if the file exists in text form and is even basic in structure, it wouldn't take long for someone that barely knows Python to some basic CSV parsing and be done with it in < 2h

They stop short of admitting to it being complete nonsense & indefensible in the (late) internal review response. Makes you wonder how many other FoIA requests get fobbed off for similar dubious reasons doesn't it...

 

[Russel]

No but the cost would still be prohibitive to do so, many stations have layouts that would make it extremely difficult. If they aren’t manned for long enough, and therefore left open, then you don’t solve the problem as people can still not tap in/out if the gates are open.

Stand alone Oyster style readers solve the issue of awkward layouts.

Plenty of signage, announcements etc combined with a max fare for any on tap outs and people will soon learn.

The DLR has been barrierless since opening...

 

[Benjwri]

Stand alone Oyster style readers solve the issue of awkward layouts.

Plenty of signage, announcements etc combined with a max fare for any on tap outs and people will soon learn.

The DLR has been barrierless since opening...

But that defeats the point of doing so? The point of the trial is that people aren't tapping in because the area is so large the incomplete journey charge is cheaper. Anywhere in the oval area already has these, so it isn't combatting the issue in the slightest?

 

[Russel]

But that defeats the point of doing so? The point of the trial is that people aren't tapping in because the area is so large the incomplete journey charge is cheaper. Anywhere in the oval area already has these, so it isn't combatting the issue in the slightest?

Then that would suggest an increase in the incomplete journey charge is required, make it the equivalent of a £100 penalty fare, there could be the option to complete a couple of journeys manually per month as per TFL in the case of genuine mistakes.

 

[sleepy_hollow]

Perhaps in London everyone is a criminal or has decided that 'the system' is loaded against them so they will game it as much as possible but out here deep in the West Country (Bristol) my experience of PAYG default max fares has been that they result from the system losing taps that have written to the card, so for a start, I take a screenshot of the journey after every stage, a stage being when there are two station names on the card. Once a tap is lost or delayed you get into a whole morass of problems. For example website customer correction failures & the fact that the penalty fare process starts after two days, but the missing taps can take five to arrive, or strange correction logic when they do.(See GWR PAYG thread.)

A recent case where it turns out that the taps at Sea Mills were getting lost for a month would have lead to anyone using a card regularly for varied journeys getting charged four penalty fares and having their card cancelled within the week. In my case I failed to notice two correct autofills, and only had a penalty fare charged on a third trip, which I got refunded a fortnight later the day it was charged. However, although the penalty fare process takes a fortnight the complaint recovery process is advertised as taking up to a month and goes through the usual two automatic refusals after which you finally contact a human who can usually get it right at the second attempt. (See GWR PAYG thread.)

So before the dominant assumption on this thread that penalty fares arise only from customer error or fraud becomes valid the railway needs to be quite sure that all its processes and equipment work properly in all cases.

In the meantime the customer motto has to be :

'Tap in, Tap out & watch it like a hawk.'

 

[speedy1]

That sounds horrendous. Do you continue to use PAYG? Just reading that makes me feel that it should be binned off entirely. Can't imagine actually being a victim of that theft and Kafkaesque customer 'service'.

 

[sleepy_hollow]

I am afraid I do. It is just so convenient & also the GWR PAYG structure saves money on single journeys, including allowing you to decide after the outward journey where you are returning from, but I suspect that for most people those are minor advantages compared to just buying a return on their phone. Nevertheless I do believe there are about half a dozen other GWR PAYG users.

On the disadvantage side tapping out to abandon a journey on PAYG means you have to explain why that was not the journey you set out to make when claiming delay repay. In the most amusing case, when the train stopped at Avonmouth, left and was stopped by a track circuit failure at the level crossing under the M5 before reversing to Avonmouth I had to explain that if I had only intended to travel to Avonmouth I would have tapped out when the train first arrived there, not twenty minutes later, when it returned there.

Which reminds me, must fill in a complaints form to report the south terminal at SML not beeping, & take the screenshot for today's journey. Very convenient at the station, less so when you get to the background admin.

 

[Benjwri]

Perhaps in London everyone is a criminal or has decided that 'the system' is loaded against them so they will game it as much as possible but out here deep in the West Country (Bristol) my experience of PAYG default max fares has been that they result from the system losing taps that have written to the card, so for a start, I take a screenshot of the journey after every stage, a stage being when there are two station names on the card. Once a tap is lost or delayed you get into a whole morass of problems. For example website customer correction failures & the fact that the penalty fare process starts after two days, but the missing taps can take five to arrive, or strange correction logic when they do.(See GWR PAYG thread.)

A recent case where it turns out that the taps at Sea Mills were getting lost for a month would have lead to anyone using a card regularly for varied journeys getting charged four penalty fares and having their card cancelled within the week. In my case I failed to notice two correct autofills, and only had a penalty fare charged on a third trip, which I got refunded a fortnight later the day it was charged. However, although the penalty fare process takes a fortnight the complaint recovery process is advertised as taking up to a month and goes through the usual two automatic refusals after which you finally contact a human who can usually get it right at the second attempt. (See GWR PAYG thread.)

So before the dominant assumption on this thread that penalty fares arise only from customer error or fraud becomes valid the railway needs to be quite sure that all its processes and equipment work properly in all cases.

In the meantime the customer motto has to be :

'Tap in, Tap out & watch it like a hawk.'

The TfL system is far more reliable than the Bristol one and a totally different technology. It’s been running for 12 years so they have a pretty good idea how reliable it is. I certainly haven’t seen many threads on it not working because of reader faults like you do for Bristol, and it has many magnitudes more users.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 13 Jul 2026 ==

Then that would suggest an increase in the incomplete journey charge is required, make it the equivalent of a £100 penalty fare, there could be the option to complete a couple of journeys manually per month as per TFL in the case of genuine mistakes.

So you’re saying do what the trial is doing?

 

[Russel]

So you’re saying do what the trial is doing?

No, I'm suggesting it should be higher than the £30 stated, but my point was more that the barrier open/no barriers issue isn't a dealbreaker.

 

[sleepy_hollow]

The TfL system is far more reliable than the Bristol one and a totally different technology. It’s been running for 12 years so they have a pretty good idea how reliable it is. I certainly haven’t seen many threads on it not working because of reader faults like you do for Bristol, and it has many magnitudes more users.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 13 Jul 2026 ==

....

Interesting, so about five years after a better system came into use in London, Bristol received a worse one. All the signs are that although the top level specification is good below the surface the Bristol PAYG software & equipment are dreadful.

And more interesting still, as far as I can tell from the appropriate thread, just across the Bristol Channel the newer TFW PAYG system is even worse, not even claiming to work properly, for example in handling railcards.

 

[speedy1]

Reality being, outside of London and SE the PAYG technology will be riddled with issues, the contract for which will be passed around like a church collection tray between various subpar 'tech' firms every few years, making various mates some good money. i.e. it will mirror the rest of the railway

 

[Sonic1234]

I am afraid I do. It is just so convenient

This is what is behind it all - convenience and breaking the link between the act of travel and paying for travel.

Is buying a ticket that hard? I've never found pressing a couple of buttons on a TVM that inconvenient. Ticket offices will have even less custom in the PAYG area, but it still won't be politically possible to close them.

 

[Taunton]

Possibly not, but the trial seems to be designed to dramatically increase the maximum charge for not tapping in or out to try and dissuade people from "accidentally" forgetting to touch in or out in the shires.

I'm afraid a sneering attitude to incomplete journey passengers seems to be what has developed at TfL/Oval etc, believing that such passengers are all invariably serial fraudsters and deserve what's coming to them.

For the record I don't think I've accidentally missed a touch since the scheme started, which I put down to having more than the average understanding of how it works. I have however had a few unexpected incompletes, which I trace back to hardware unreliability, and given the adjacent records certainly should have raised a flag in the supposed highly expensive logic programming that it's a nonsense combination, especially as the DLR units, unlike Tube barriers, do both touch in and out. Meanwhile, the Oyster cards we give out to our overseas family visitors to us in London, to get around on their own, very regularly do have missing touch outs, again especially as we are on the DLR, despite my considerable instruction the first time they use them, which points to issues for non-regular users.

Stand alone Oyster style readers solve the issue of awkward layouts.

Almost. But they need a power supply and a data connection. This is what is behind a number of the sub-optimal positionings of such units on the DLR.

 

[Tetchytyke]

That's crazy. It is very secretive because the bonkers cheap fare from East Croydon to Gatwick meant that the full fares were rarely being charged when CPAY was first introduced.

True, especially about the East Croydon to Gatwick fare. People who know what they're doing will do the switchback through the barriers at East Croydon. I only didn't this time because I was with Mrs Tyke and two suitcases and the juice wasn't worth the squeeze that day.

I'm afraid a sneering attitude to incomplete journey passengers seems to be what has developed at TfL/Oval etc, believing that such passengers are all invariably serial fraudsters and deserve what's coming to them.

A brief look at the disputes forum can illustrate why that attitude has arisen, though. There are a notable number of people who think they've discovered a lovely little wheeze where they buy a cheap single at the country end- but only if the barriers are closed- and just tap in/out at Liverpool Street.

I think I've forgotten to tap out three times in twenty years, including five years living in London. In all cases it has been where the readers aren't immediately obvious when leaving the station- Woodside Park being a good example.

 

[Watershed]

I only didn't this time because I was with Mrs Tyke and two suitcases and the juice wasn't worth the squeeze that day.

Not sure if it's occurred to you, but she and the suitcases could stay on the platform whilst you touch out with your card, touch back in with your card, and then do the same again with hers. Might attract some raised eyebrows from the barrier staff but there's nothing illegal about it.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Not sure if it's occurred to you, but she and the suitcases could stay on the platform whilst you touch out with your card, touch back in with your card, and then do the same again with hers.

It has. She gave me The Look when I suggested it