Do We Really Need Ticket Offices?

[Starmill]

I think what this demonstrates more clearly than anything is that the UK is not Germany.

 

[Andrewlong]

I am pretty neutral on ticket offices - great if they are open but where I live they are only open in the morning and so you are forced to use a machine.

My biggest moan is that outside of London we are stuck with paper tickets - ie we can't use an oyster equivalent or a pay and wave card. Buying a ticket online is great - pity you are still forced to convert it into a paper ticket by keying a reference number into a machine. No smartphone apps with machine readable tickets as you do on airlines.

I live near Reading and Reading Buses have just launched an app plus they are promising contactless payments by end of year. Yet railways still rely on paper tickets!

 

[yorksrob]

I prefer paper tickets. At least they won't disappear when they run out of electricity, and I have the details written down on them so that I can check that they are the correct validity.

 

[transmanche]

My biggest moan is that outside of London we are stuck with paper tickets - ie we can't use an oyster equivalent or a pay and wave card. Buying a ticket online is great - pity you are still forced to convert it into a paper ticket by keying a reference number into a machine. No smartphone apps with machine readable tickets as you do on airlines.

In North East England and North West England there is a pilot where you can use a smartphone app to purchase an mTicket for Anytime and Off-Peak ticket types, as well as Advance fares. It's available on journeys between Newcastle-York and Carlisle-Preston and various branches; e.g. Tyne Valley and Cumbrian Coast.

Just last week I bought a Newcastle-Hexham return this way whilst I was sitting in Newcastle station. (This was mainly because the TVM wouldn't sell me the fare I wanted until 10:00.)
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I do actually advocate a zonal system for regional ticketing. The Dutch model of "square" rather than concentric zones would work well. To avoid anomalies at zone boundaries, two zones would be the minimum fare. Either a standard price per zone could be used, or TOCs could set the fares (one off-peak single, one peak single, one day rover) for travel in or across any given zone under their control.

There is one place in the UK which used to have a Dutch-style zonal system - Tyne & Wear.



Single tickets were simple: you paid for 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5+ zones. Short distance tickets were simple too: A, B, C or D tickets corresponded to 1, 2, 3 or 4 fare stages and they worked across zonal boundaries too. Transfare tickets were available for 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5+ zones too.

But they decided to 'simplify' the system. Now there's one set of zones for Metro, a different set for Transfares, and a third set for inter-modal season tickets. Plus a myriad of different systems used by the bus companies...

 

[HH]

The SPT Zonecard doesn't count? Last I looked, Scotland was still in the UK.

 

[Frontera2]

So, the basic argument lives in whether an increase in the complexity of TVMs would be welcome in any way. I, as a highly computer literate person would probably be absolutely fine. My mum, as someone who often struggles with technology (not to any extreme amount either, just isn't as comfortable as me), probably would not. Just the concept of say, buying a ticket from a different origin station, while maintaining the simplicity of "buy off-peak return from here to y", is something that would be very difficult to do (I know, I write software for a living, this is one of the major challenges in software development). Even if you had some absolutely genius interface designers making your interface, you'd still have to deal with a notable slow-down in the throughput of passengers at the ticket vending point, because you have more opportunities to have a decision "fork", which slows down thinking time, let alone the number of touches. You'd also get "chancers", who maybe aren't great at technology, but think they are, trying to get themselves a discount by trying lots of different options, again, slowing down the TVMs' throughput.

Clearly we "currently" need ticket offices, because if they disappeared overnight, you'd lose about 80% of feasible tickets to purchase, in case that wasn't collossally clear to anyone.

I think it's the TVMs themselves that need looking at. I've been using self service machines for 15 years in France and on them you can very easily do the following:

Buy tickets for a different origin / different travel day
Make reservations
Mix and match discounts and railcards
Cancel / amend tickets and get refunds
Make a timetable enquiry

If they can do it, surely it wouldn't be impossible for us to follow?

For X ample when you use the machine the first question it asks is: what station are you travelling from. It defaults to the location of the machine but there's a button clearly stating "other stations"

 

[Bletchleyite]

The SPT Zonecard doesn't count? Last I looked, Scotland was still in the UK.

Merseytravel also have a similar scheme.

 

[The Ham]

I think it's the TVMs themselves that need looking at. I've been using self service machines for 15 years in France and on them you can very easily do the following:

Buy tickets for a different origin / different travel day
Make reservations
Mix and match discounts and railcards
Cancel / amend tickets and get refunds
Make a timetable enquiry

If they can do it, surely it wouldn't be impossible for us to follow?

For X ample when you use the machine the first question it asks is: what station are you travelling from. It defaults to the location of the machine but there's a button clearly stating "other stations"

Even if the TOC's were concerned about people buying tickets for one or two stops, when travelling much further, to enable them to exit a gateline then they could develop a way of swiping a ticket or presenting a smart card to "show" you have a valid ticket for that journey any you are just buying an extension. Although that could still be open to abuse, so is the current system and so hopefully the extra benefits involved in making the systems smarter would be worth doing.

The other thing that would be useful with TVMs is to enable you to link number plates of your vehicles to you smart card to enable you to pay for parking without having to return to your vehicle (although it could still provide you with a printed receipt so you still had proof of purchase). May not be possible everywhere but where you already have text or phone to pay for parking then I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.

 

[PeterC]

The other thing that would be useful with TVMs is to enable you to link number plates of your vehicles to you smart card to enable you to pay for parking without having to return to your vehicle (although it could still provide you with a printed receipt so you still had proof of purchase). May not be possible everywhere but where you already have text or phone to pay for parking then I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.

ANPR is being introduced at Underground station car parks although I haven't tried it yet. It still requires going to a separate machine and you still can't use your Oyster card to pay.

 

[transmanche]

The SPT Zonecard doesn't count? Last I looked, Scotland was still in the UK.

Merseytravel also have a similar scheme.

Those are both season tickets aren't they? The T&W Zonal system was for both season tickets and single journeys, including multi-mode single journeys.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Those are both season tickets aren't they?

Yes, and day tickets.

 

[transmanche]

Yes, and day tickets.

So not tickets for single journeys then, which was the point being made.

 

[Bletchleyite]

So not tickets for single journeys then, which was the point being made.

The original point was I think about European-style zonal systems, which does stand - though it did move onto single fares.

 

[keppoch69]

Here's a thought though. With the speed which technology has & is moving, it has sped up in the last 40 years; say, how long will "smart" payment types last? I can see us having implanted micro-chips somewhere on our person & there goes the argument about having to carry cash around, or a payment card of some flavour.
Photographic driving licence/identity card, not needed. Ditto passports.

 

[glbotu]

I can see a huge benefit in more contactless-card based systems, with a post-hoc fare calculator which waits to see if you make more journeys. This is nice for many reasons, because the system is then all server side and all the local machine has to do is let you in, which means that you don't have to worry about making insta-transactions.

The TfL system does a couple of neat things.

The first, is that it calculates your fare at the end of the day (rather than the Oyster, which figures it out as you go). There's a great video by Londonist about the fact that contactless is cheaper, because it'll come up with more creative journey combinations, so you end up paying less, especially wrt peak/off-peak combinations.

The second is that if it records a touch-in the following day, it starts trying to figure out whether you're eligible for the weekly cap instead, so can be cheaper that way.

In a fully contactless card - based system, you don't need TVMs at all. Just contactless card readers and ticket offices. The contactless card system can easily calculate your weekly/monthly/yearly passes (just keep touching in and touching out at your desired stations) and are obviously very well suited to all the easy ticket types. The ticket offices are then there for figuring out more complicated tickets (like Advances), that the contactless card system can't handle and possibly registering contactless cards for railcards etc.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Even if the TOC's were concerned about people buying tickets for one or two stops

GTR and SWT are not concerned about such things as all their TVMs do remote issues.

Time the others caught up.

 

[The Ham]

I can see a huge benefit in more contactless-card based systems, with a post-hoc fare calculator which waits to see if you make more journeys. This is nice for many reasons, because the system is then all server side and all the local machine has to do is let you in, which means that you don't have to worry about making insta-transactions.

The TfL system does a couple of neat things.

The first, is that it calculates your fare at the end of the day (rather than the Oyster, which figures it out as you go). There's a great video by Londonist about the fact that contactless is cheaper, because it'll come up with more creative journey combinations, so you end up paying less, especially wrt peak/off-peak combinations.

The second is that if it records a touch-in the following day, it starts trying to figure out whether you're eligible for the weekly cap instead, so can be cheaper that way.

In a fully contactless card - based system, you don't need TVMs at all. Just contactless card readers and ticket offices. The contactless card system can easily calculate your weekly/monthly/yearly passes (just keep touching in and touching out at your desired stations) and are obviously very well suited to all the easy ticket types. The ticket offices are then there for figuring out more complicated tickets (like Advances), that the contactless card system can't handle and possibly registering contactless cards for railcards etc.

Even Advances could be "loaded" to your account so that it doesn't charge you for that trip again when you touch in and touch out.

The only problem could be working out how/when you are charged. As with TfL you are talking about the loss of a few pounds if payment isn't able to be taken. As such it could be that TOC's have a policy that you have to prebook certain journeys or that they hold a certain security deposit based on how reliable your payment history is (linked to a credit card with no defaults on payments £0 deposit through to if you have several late payments or your card is not linked to an account and requiring a minimum of, say, £50 remaining to enter a station)

 

[AlterEgo]

Even Advances could be "loaded" to your account so that it doesn't charge you for that trip again when you touch in and touch out.

The only problem could be working out how/when you are charged. As with TfL you are talking about the loss of a few pounds if payment isn't able to be taken. As such it could be that TOC's have a policy that you have to prebook certain journeys or that they hold a certain security deposit based on how reliable your payment history is (linked to a credit card with no defaults on payments £0 deposit through to if you have several late payments or your card is not linked to an account and requiring a minimum of, say, £50 remaining to enter a station)

I believe a contactless payment is done "offline" and will therefore always go through. It is the banks which set a limit.