Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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 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.

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.

Does a paper ticket do anything to prevent this?

> 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.

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.

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