Contactless -- apparently overcharged for being delayed

[181]

The other week I used contactless payment to travel Surbiton-Waterloo-Paddington-Reading. When my bank statement arrived, I found that I'd been charged £19.30 instead of the expected £15.60 (from TFL's single fare finder) or £16.00 (from brfares.com -- does anyone know the reason for that discrepancy?).

£19.30 appears to be the sum of the fares for two separate journeys, Surbiton-Paddington and Paddington-Reading. I presume that the extended wait for a train due to Storm Bert/driver shortages meant that I was outside the barriers for long enough for the journeys not to get linked (I didn't think it was as long as the 40 minutes that the TFL website indicates, but perhaps it was). It's not a large sum of money in the grand scheme of things, but in principle it seems wrong to charge peoople more for the privilege of being delayed.

Am I right in thinking that there isn't any way to rectify the situation for an unregistered card? And how easy would it be to get a refund if the card was registered? (If it makes a difference, if I'd hurried at Paddington I might have been able to get a Crossrail train that got me to Reading at about the same time as the train I actually got was scheduled to arrive, so they might try and argue that it was my fault).

It seems to me that this situation may become quite common as contactless payment spreads across the south-east -- if you're allowed 40 minutes between leavng the Underground and boarding your onward train, and the service is half-hourly (as many are), then if you arrive in good time for your planned departure it only takes one cancellation to put you at risk of being overcharged.

 

[plugwash]

I think you can look up your travel history even if you card is not registered, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

[Bletchleyite]

This is going to be an issue once Aylesbury Vale Parkway is brought in as this is only hourly during the day, particularly if there is a cancellation that could easily go to 2. Is it capable of being changed for different destinations or only where you tap in?

It does seem to be something where LU is different from the mainline - mostly you wait within the gateline on LU, mostly you wait outside it at London termini on the mainline.

 

[plugwash]

I'm pretty sure "out of station" interchange times are based purely on which NLCs you are interchanging between.

 

[akm]

I think you can look up your travel history even if you card is not registered, but I'm not 100% sure.

For the last seven days, yes. Here: https://contactless.tfl.gov.uk/HomePage/7DayHistory

The card history is saved for 13 months behind the scenes and will magically appear when a card is registered

 

[plugwash]

I think this is an example of the london PAYG system "creaking at the seams", it was designed as a system for frequent metro services over relatively short distances, with a few NR services included because of historic interavailability with LU, but it's gradually expanded to more and more rail services and this creates problems with no great solution. Infrequent services are one, "maximum fares" are another.

A 40 minite OSI time is already something of a fudge that can easilly end up joining together what a reasonable passenger would regard as two seperate journeys. Most of the time this works in the passengers favour but not always. In particular I've seen complaints about people being charged peak fares for what would normally be off-peak trains, because a previous journey on LU was joined up with their rail journey.

 

[JonathanH]

I think this is an example of the london PAYG system "creaking at the seams", it was designed as a system for frequent metro services over relatively short distances, with a few NR services included because of historic interavailability with LU, but it's gradually expanded to more and more rail services and this creates problems with no great solution. Infrequent services are one, "maximum fares" are another.

The extension of London PAYG I generally regarded as something passengers want to see happen, driven particularly by people seeing how convenient it is for London travel, and not appreciating the limitations of the system.

It is only really at the terminal stations where the idea of waiting on the concourse arises and potentially causes issues. For journeys involving Thameslink, for example, and indeed other 'through' interchanges, a passenger would more likely wait on the platform inside the barriers.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The extension of London PAYG I generally regarded as something passengers want to see happen, driven particularly by people seeing how convenient it is for London travel, and not appreciating the limitations of the system.

I think people want to see PAYG expanded as an option, and see London as an example of how it should work, rather than specifically wanting the London system expanding.

 

[jon81uk]

Am I right in thinking that there isn't any way to rectify the situation for an unregistered card? And how easy would it be to get a refund if the card was registered? (

Register the card now and you'll be able to see the history, but don't think this is something you can correct yourself and would either need to send a message once logged in, or call TfL.

 

[redreni]

The extension of London PAYG I generally regarded as something passengers want to see happen, driven particularly by people seeing how convenient it is for London travel, and not appreciating the limitations of the system.

I agree entirely.

PAYG was originally introduced in a context where the fares were generally simple and zonal. And it was introduced with the intention of scrapping most of the fares that had hitherto been available as paper tickets, and making the remaining paper tickets so expensive nobody in their right mind would buy them. Thus PAYG wasn't seen as adding complexity to the fares, as it was pretty much always cheaper than buying a ticket and so most passengers only had one system (PAYG) to worry about.

As soon as you expand PAYG onto the National Rail network, particularly outside the zones but even within the zones, you do add a layer of complexity to fares in the areas where people can make journeys either using PAYG or using a ticket.

Thread after thread on this forum deals with journeys in and around London where in order to determine the cheapest fare, one has to compare the cost of PAYG against tickets (and against splits involving tickets for one leg of the journey and PAYG for another), including in some cases ascertaining exactly when the person wants to travel so as to account for the two systems' different criteria for charging peak or off-peak fares.

And as regards the point raised by the OP, one of the advantages of tickets over PAYG is it is much easier for the passenger to choose whether to pay the fare for the through journey or to pay separately for two or more legs of the journey (compliantly with the NRCoT, of course). In a case like this where the through fare is cheaper than splitting at Paddington, doing it on PAYG gives rise to the problem of a more expensive split fare being charged if the passenger is delayed and has to wait a long time on the concourse.

But equally, in cases where the split PAYG fare is cheaper than the through fare (because, for example, the National Rail leg starts shortly after 18:57), a passenger transferring from the Elizabeth Line or LU at Paddington would need to do something contrived such as tapping in on a bus and then getting straight off again, in order to break the OSI without waiting the requisite time.

 

[xotGD]

But equally, in cases where the split PAYG fare is cheaper than the through fare (because, for example, the National Rail leg starts shortly after 18:57), a passenger transferring from the Elizabeth Line or LU at Paddington would need to do something contrived such as tapping in on a bus and then getting straight off again, in order to break the OSI without waiting the requisite time.

Or paying with two different cards for the two journeys?

 

[smsm1]

The Scotrail Tap & Pay system joins journeys together to use the relevant cheapest through ticket, even if there is a break of journey or gap of several stations in the middle. Maybe the contactless system could be updated to support this in the future, this avoiding issues of paper tickets being cheaper in some scenarios?

 

[Joe Paxton]

The Scotrail Tap & Pay system joins journeys together to use the relevant cheapest through ticket, even if there is a break of journey or gap of several stations in the middle. Maybe the contactless system could be updated to support this in the future, this avoiding issues of paper tickets being cheaper in some scenarios?

It could. The fare calculation logic for contactless (unlike Oyster, at least in its current form) all happens in the back office systems. I imagine things will develop as contactless acceptance expands with Project Oval.

 

[cactustwirly]

This is going to be an issue once Aylesbury Vale Parkway is brought in as this is only hourly during the day, particularly if there is a cancellation that could easily go to 2. Is it capable of being changed for different destinations or only where you tap in?

It does seem to be something where LU is different from the mainline - mostly you wait within the gateline on LU, mostly you wait outside it at London termini on the mainline.

It works with Marlow which also has an hourly service

 

[plugwash]

I think people want to see PAYG expanded as an option, and see London as an example of how it should work, rather than specifically wanting the London system expanding.

The problem is, you can't really have more than one contactless EMV PAYG system operating in a given area. Given the already large size of the "london" scheme and London's general dominance in the south east expanding the Lodon system is the only feasible option in that area.

More widely, even with what has been already proposed I forsee problems with people trying to touch in and touch out in different PAYG schemes, particularly if Manchester and Liverpool end up with seperate schemes.

 

[smsm1]

The problem is, you can't really have more than one contactless EMV PAYG system operating in a given area.

The Dutch have a contactless system that covers the whole country. They have a different date scheme though where there is a small fee for boarding a vehicle and the rest of the cost is based on the distance traveled. You can pay a monthly fee for a percentage reduction in the travel costs. Granted that would be a huge change to the current system but would aid rollout to a wider area with less complexity in some ways.