London Banter - View Single Post - Future of CDRs and NR season tickets in TfL zones?

Paul Corfield · February 13th 05, 11:07 AM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 11:41:09 GMT, (Neil
Williams) wrote:

For the Tube to go point-to-point there would be a massive cost,
because TfL's ticketing equipment is *not* geared up to
point-to-point. The barriers would probably be easily adaptable, but
there are vast numbers of old-style ticket machines out there with
only zonal buttons, and they'd all have to be replaced.

Actually this is incorrect. The system was designed before zonal fares
and thus it can [1] cope with point to point tickets on LUL. The big
issue would be the risk of far more confusion for ticket sellers and
much slower ticket transactions as passengers would need to press far
more buttons on the touch screen machines to get the fare on the screen.

With the few fare machines they would become less useful, as you point
out, because their range of ticket values would be very restricted.

If you then add in the possibility of the peak and off peak pre-pay
variants you would have a massive expansion of possible fare values for
the LUL system as a whole. This is before you deal with the through
ticketing from DLR, Tramlink and National Rail issues. The risk of
people paying the wrong fare thus increases causing more delays and
ticket rejections at gates. Also if the system becomes very complex then
the processing time at gates *could* increase marginally thus reducing
throughput - I would accept this is unlikely in most scenarios though.

While I vaguely understand the "we're being overcharged" argument from
the pro point to point people I think adoption of such a system on LUL
would create huge disbenefits. LUL has been trying to get a fare /
product range in place that gets rid of the need for a fare purchase
(and thus a queue) every trip. Now we're on the verge of getting to
something that is reasonable (though not ideal in my view) people want
to push us back to square one. Brilliant eh?

[1] it was certainly the case when I used to run the fare computer! It
is possible it has changed as a result of Prestige but I somehow doubt
that LU would have removed that part of the system design.
--
Paul C

Admits to working for London Underground!