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Comment by eynsham | Hacker News Reader

This is in theory a problem with most ticketing systems: people can buy the wrong ticket and then get stuck on the way out. The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true (e.g. enter at Bond St with contactless or a single, go to Reading via Crossrail, go to Manchester via Cross Country). Depending on how naïve one seems and how far one goes beyond the contactless area, staff may be more or less sympathetic, as the sibling comment suggests. We ought to roll out contactless nationally, and hopefully this will happen under British Rail.

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Because long distance travel can be very expensive it's trickier to make this work, financially. Suppose I "buy" a TfL Oyster card, use almost its entire balance, then Enter the system at peak time and just walk out (without validating) at some semi-rural station like Amersham. Oyster automatically reduces the card balance by the maximum fare, making the balance negative. Since I walked out without validating it couldn't - even if it were legal (which it isn't) - refuse to let me out, but it can refuse to let me back in.

Oyster will invalidate this card (until I pay off the balance), its balance is now hugely negative, but obviously I'm not going to pay off that balance, so I effectively got (most of) a free journey.

At London scale this feels pretty OK. In London a typical Oyster journey is cheaper than a pint of beer, if somebody "owes" you a pint of beer and then you never see them again you probably aren't bent out of shape about that. But Nationally it's a much greater cost. What if I travel from St Ives to Wick? That's going to be pretty expensive, but somehow we need to accept that I entered at St Ives (maybe for a local journey?) and yet might get out at Wick (the far end of the country) and if I don't have the money for this long journey all of that risk burden lands on... the fare operator? The government? The credit card company? Nobody wants that burden.

This is one of those things where it doesn't actually matter in the long run, as long as most people do not abuse the system. It relies on social cohesion to a point.

So long as the train isn't entirely full and you're taking up a seat that could be used by someone else, the marginal cost (in fuel, maintenance, etc) to the train operator of having an additional person on the train is very close to zero. The train is going from St Ives to Wick anyway; if you do what you describe, the train operator is in essentially the same situation as if you had simply decided not to take the trip.

So as long as the fares that are actually paid are sufficient to operate the train and pay wages to the employees, the train operator can absorb the handful of people who do what you describe. As long as most people don't cheat the system in that way, it's easier to simply ignore.

>So as long as the fares that are actually paid are sufficient to operate the train and pay wages to the employees

That would be a rare exception to the rule. Almost all public transport systems run at a loss and rely on public subsidy; revenues lost through fare evasion increase the burden on the taxpayer.

TfL claims they have an operating surplus.

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/...

They do. But their income includes revenue from taxation. Suppose you own a London business. You pay taxes to the local government. In London, these taxes include money for TfL. After all, you chose to put the business in London, a city with a large public transport network, if you didn't like that you could have put your business in, say, Slough, and avoided this cost.

Passenger revenue is TfL's largest source of income by some distance, but it's nowhere close to enough to pay for the entire network, let alone the necessary capital investments to grow and change with the city. And of course if prices went up, ridership would fall, and transport would be diverted to the over-stretched and polluting private transport options which the city does not want.

Does a paper ticket do anything to prevent this?

Similar problem. Consider the train:

  London → Clapham Junction → many more stops → Hassocks → Brighton.

You could buy two paper tickets, London to Clapham Junction and Hassocks to Brighton. Use the first ticket to enter in London, the other to exit at Brighton. This only works if you're confident the ticket won't be checked on the train.

A safer option: buy an open return ticket London → Brighton. The London→Brighton bit is only valid that day, but the Brighton→London bit is valid for 30 days. Get through the barriers at Brighton with a Brighton→Hassocks ticket. Show the return ticket as required to the ticket inspector on the train, and use a Clapham Junction→London ticket to exit the station (the barrier swallows this used ticket).

The first of these is known as “doughnutting” and train companies are cracking down hard on it - there are countless reports of prosecutions on the busiest UK rail forum. They use a combination of ticket sales analysis (because most people do it with the same card and through the same retailer) and CCTV.

> The London→Brighton bit is only valid that day, but the Brighton→London bit is valid for 30 days. Get through the barriers at Brighton with a Brighton→Hassocks ticket.

Wait, if you already have a Brighton→London return ticket, why would you bother to buy Brighton→Hassocks and Clapham Junction→London tickets? Couldn't you just use the Brighton→London return ticket?

This way, you can re-use the return part of the ticket for multiple trips, either until it gets stamped or marked by the ticket inspector, or the 30 days are up.

Yes, because you pay upfront for the whole value of the trip. So you can’t get out of paying by simply not tapping out.

> Does a paper ticket do anything to prevent this?

Ticket inspectors used to mark the tickets so they'd know if someone was reusing a ticket. Originally it would be clipped, then date stamped, and towards the end on South West Trains it was a scribble of biro (or black marker if you were unlucky).

On the occasional trips I take I now use an e-ticket. I have never had the QR(ish) code on it scanned for validity.

Might be different with each TOC. Northern inspectors always scan the QR code as to ticket barriers.

Denmark's Oyster-ish system covers the whole country. Anonymous cards need a balance of at least 70kr to start a journey, and are limited to a region of the country — e.g. Zealand (Copenhagen's island) and nearby small islands. Adding the non-refundable cost of the card gives an amount larger than the longest journey within that area.

It's possible to set an anonymous card to a high advance payment (600kr = 80€), and then use it to travel across the country.

Great Britain is significantly larger, has much higher train fares, and isn't neatly divided into islands. They could limit it to contactless credit/debit cards, but I don't see a neat way to extend Oyster over the whole country.

The Netherlands used to have this system over the full country (OV chipcard) when I lived there (it seems to still exist), the card could be anonymous too.

After the French ticketing system, this felt magical to me.

The reality is that in the UK as many other places in the world, public transport is highly subsidized. All these little transport fiefdoms and zones aren't accomplishing anything at all. There is no good reason to not have a single payment system.

It would be impractical to roll out nationally without enormous levels of fare evasion. Once you leave London some stations don't have any ticket barriers, most stations will close ticket barriers once the evening peak is over and so on.

Let's say I get on and 'tap in' at London Euston then travel to oxenholme (no ticket barriers, but a 2-3 hour £60 trip) if I don't tap out what should I be charged? This would have to be the same amount as if I travelled one stop on the tube in London and forgot to tap out. What if I tapped in at London got off the train after one stop and tapped out without leaving the station then continued my journey?

What minimum amount should my oyster card (or debit card) have on it in order to take a tap in? It would have to be ~£2.55 as that's the minimum fare; yet once in I could take a £200 train journey.

A big part of why the London system works is that it's quite literally small beer. The journey price range is something like £2.55-£9; in that case you can afford to do all sorts of things like have someone tap in with £2.55 on thier card and tap out with a negative balance, and generally cope with a small number of edge cases and loopholes that are an inherent part of providing contactless travel.

How does that work with paper tickets then? Couldn't you do the same thing of buying a cheap ticket then stepping onto an expensive train? Or is there paper ticket infra that's rolled out everywhere to prevent this?

The prevention is deterrance: because you need to buy the ticket up front, ticket inspectors can check that you have the right ticket and issue fines if you do not. You can cheat (for many journeys you can walk on and off the train without passing through a barrier, especially at odd hours) but you are taking a risk. If there's no pre-commitement to the journey then there's no real deterrent risk.

What exactly is the deterance?

Is there a person or machine who physically inspects the ticket before you board each train? Or is it that the person who sold you the ticket is probably going to be able see if you physically go to the wrong train for the ticket you just bought and yell if you go to the wrong one? Or is it that for most folks, the act of talking to a physical person keeps them honest even if they could lie and buy a cheap ticket but board an expensive train? Or something else?

The key difference is that the paper ticket specifies the entry and exit stations.

When tapping a smart card you don't specify the exit because that's exactly the thing that makes it a faster/more convenient method of payment. There is no way to check whether you intend to pay until you exit, and then it's already too late unless a physical barrier is present at every station.

There is usually a machine that inspects the ticket on entering the platform. There is usually a machine that inspects the ticket on exiting the platform, and there is sometimes a person walking along the train asking to see everyone's tickets. The machines are backed up by people, if there's no-one manning the line of barriers then they're just left open, and they act as a fallback for damaged tickets and the like, as well as someone you can plead your case to if you've lost it. Generally if you try to enter without a ticket you'll be turned away. Trying to leave without a ticket will be harder without paying a fine, as will getting caught without one on the actual train (again, you can try to plead your case, and there are legimitate reasons like the ticket machine at the station you left from not working, in which case you can buy the ticket at your destination, but you'll need to be believed).

> The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true

The article makes it sound like they don't show the message in this case

> The Passenger Operated Machine (POM), to use the TfL name for the ticket machines, doesn’t show the pop-up for every journey that they can sell tickets for because not every destination accepts contactless PAYG tickets, but those that can will get the message. Over time, as more National Rail stations are added to the contactless payments system, the ticket machines will be updated to include them in the messaging.

The message doesn’t say that the option is only available on the selected route.

It’s fair the assume that passengers are going to “learn” about this and try again next time in a different route, only to arrive at a destination that doesn’t support it.

It's not as though it's hard to predict in general. These aren't like "Of 492 stations served by TfL 328 picked essentially at random take contactless but the rest do not". The situation is that all of TfL's stations and all the stations in the region they get to control even if operated by somebody else, take contactless.

There are edge cases, but, they're literally edge cases, they're at the edge. Example, suppose I'm in central London and I want to go to Amersham. That's a Tube station, it's notionally in London for this purpose so my contactless just works. How about if I travel slightly further along that line, to Great Missenden? That's no longer in London, contactless is unavailable.

But, why would I expect Missenden would work? It's not in London, it's not shown on a Tube map or a TfL London map, Amersham is (right at the top left) but Missenden isn't, because it's not in London by this definition, you have finally left.

Could I be confused because I'm on a tube train? Nope. Tube trains don't go that far, they don't go beyond Amersham on that line. Once upon a time you could get tube trains out to Missenden (we're not talking last week, this is when they were steam trains like 60+ years ago) but not any more. So I have to have boarded a full size train, probably bound for Aylesbury, or Birmingham or something, and thought "I bet this is a London train and my London fare system applies". That's very silly.

On the homepage there is another (non-pop-up) message: ‘Use contactless to pay as you go at adult rate’.

I find Japan’s IC card system notoriously confusing here with every line operating its own fare gate, the notion of a base fare and additional fare for a line, and entry gates that require you to first walk all the way out to an exit.

The article says it only shows the message if your end destination supports contactless

On the homepage there is another (non-pop-up) message: ‘Use contactless to pay as you go at adult rate’.

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