In message , at 11:44:39 on
Sun, 25 Mar 2012, Paul Corfield remarked:

I'm only just catching up on the series, and watched the one about
revenue inspectors yesterday. Doing some quick sums on the back of an
envelope, it seems it costs them about as much to run the revenue
inspectors as the fares they are failing to collect (£20m a year). In
any event that's 1% of their turnover, and not the complete financial
disaster they portray it as. Although I agree there's an element of
"encouraging the others" so you have to been seen to be doing
*something*.

It spoilt what's otherwise a very good show

I don't understand... WHAT has spoilt?

The way they claim that the £20m in question is the straw that would
break the camel's back, allow them to rebuild the network, buy hundreds
of new trains (which they admit cost £8m each) and so on. Even though it
must be costing them £20m to collect only part of that £20m.

Oh come on. It is ticket fraud - you can hardly expect LU people to
create any sort of impression that such a scale of loss is somehow
tolerated by the organisation. You can hardly expect a series about
the Tube not to cover a subject which is known to drive fare paying
passengers mad. People who do pay hate the fact that a proportion of
their fellow travellers get away without paying. You also need to
understand the political pressure on TfL to make never ending cuts in
funding. I don't imagine Boris would be happy to see LU being sloppy
about this topic in a telly programme.

It is not an easy problem to solve as no revenue protection method is
100% effective and people are endlessly creative about how to defraud
the railway of money. The same applies in a whole range of fields
where "easy" money can be made hence why the banks, ISPs and retailers
have not solved card fraud, identity fraud or theft from shops by
shoppers and staff.

TfL is being 99% effective (iirc the figures they gave indicates that
evasion was only 1% of fare box). So while it's annoying to think some
people are travelling for free, it's not the end of the world. I'm sure
discussions here of heavy rail systems have said that the point of
diminishing returns cuts in at about 5% fare evasion.

It casts a shadow over all the other claims they make about why they are
doing stuff.

Only for you Roland. You do have a very odd view of the world at
times.

I'm very sensitive to "spin", and often see it when others don't. If
they successfully collected every single fare (and assuming they weren't
spending all the £20m to collect that "last 1%") it would have an
imperceptible effect upon fares (£1.98 instead of £2 for a single).

Like I said, it's just "security theatre" to make sure it doesn't creep
above 1%.

Then they throw out comments like "ten people on every train haven't
paid" - only if there are 1,000 on the train! What this does is make me
wonder what other things being said are similarly spun. It's sad,
because I think the series shows TfL, and especially the staff, in a
very good light, and shows the magnitude of the problems they have to
deal with day to day.
--
Roland Perry