We must stop this Oyster card rip-off in its tracks
Rosamund Urwin
20 Jun 2011

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...cks/article.do

http://tinyurl.com/oyster-ripoff

I recently paid £1.90 to ride an escalator. Up and down, mind you, so
that's only 95p a go. A few weeks later, I forked out £4.30 just to be
allowed down some stairs.

Had I stumbled upon the world's tamest theme park (the prices sound
suitably extortionate)? Nope, my money was being pinched by Transport
for London, taking its usual who-cares-about-passengers approach by
making me cough up for its failings.

Travelling on the Underground is miserable enough - with the heat, the
delays and the joy of snuggling up to BO boy's armpit on a standing-
room only journey - without passengers being regularly ripped off. Yet
TfL has decreed that it can charge us up to £7.40 - no small sum - if
we exit the same station we came in or if we commit that cardinal sin
of the Oyster era: forgetting to touch out or in.

On the first occasion I had turned up at the station, scanned the
service information sign (a perfect set of "goods"), and scurried
towards the platform. There, a train was waiting. "Happy days," I
thought, with the smile of someone whose journey was actually going to
plan for a change.

More fool me. The train sat there for 15 minutes before we were turfed
off and back upstairs, to see the cost of an M&S sandwich wiped from
our cards. I was lucky: if I had been in there less than two minutes,
that loss would have more than tripled.

The second occasion was, in part, my fault. At a railway station my
card failed to read but I walked through unaware because the gate was
closing so slowly. Summoned back by a TfL man who demanded I swipe, I
put my card to the reader and the maximum fare came off: the machine
decided I was trying to get out.

Given the often confusing rules and distribution of the Oyster
readers, especially on the DLR and trains, being hit for the maximum
fare is a complaint of almost every Tube-user I know. Passengers were
overcharged more than £60 million last year - not a vast amount less
than the £75 million TfL says that fare dodgers cost it annually.

TfL does, of course, offer an avenue to get that cash back. But it
isn't a quick process. Sometimes generous station staff will return
the pilfered funds but normally they'll direct you to an 0845 number.
The last time I called, I spent six minutes on hold enduring torturous
lift music just to get back what was rightfully mine.

Luckily for my Oyster balance, my time is cheap. Since I have watched
every episode of Made in Chelsea so far, I can't really claim to be an
"every second on this planet is precious" type of person. But for
those with a lot less time than me I imagine that calling doesn't seem
worth the hassle.

If you do ring up, you only have a short window to pass through a
particular station to have your money returned. For anyone who uses
the Tube relatively rarely - I cycle most days - it is an
inconvenience: you end up having to make a journey to get your cash
back.

With the RMT planning more days of strikes over the next two weeks,
TfL's overcharging tyranny may seem trivial. But it all adds to the
feeling that passengers are forever being short-changed.

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