Solar Penguin wrote:

Ahhh... You think it's those elusive across-London-to-Mill-Hill-East
passengers that TfL are so eager to attract with artificially low fares?

Welcome to Planet Earth. I hope you enjoy your stay.

TfL are not trying to attract passengers from Morden to MHE by
offering artificially low fares. They are not trying to penalise
Morden to Moorgate passengers by making them pay above the odds for
their journey to subsidise the MHE passengers. TfL don't give a toss
about passengers travelling from Morden to Mill Hill East, or even to
Mordor sodding Central.

What TfL have done, which is a very sensible approach in a busy city
that sees millions of tourists, is to implement a simple zonal system
made up of six concentric rings, with a set price for any station in
Za to any station in Zb. They have decided that this is the best
approximation to a fair fare system that can be achieved while
promoting simple, easy-to-understand fares and without compromising
ticket sales.

Artificially low fares to MHW or artificially high fares to zone 1?
Which are they really doing? Either way, it doesn't matter, as long as
they're stopped.

You make it sound as though there is some great conspiracy afoot
whereby all those passengers going from zone 6 through zone 1 and out
the other side are getting a free ride and that you personally are
paying for every one of them.

"As long as they're stopped" ... what are you on? They have
implemented a fare structure that works well, and has been working
well for years. As a result of this fare structure, a very small
number of journeys made have a surprisingly low "per mile" rate ... so
what? The extra money that it would cost to resolve this discrepancy
is far more than any such solution would raise in additional revenue -
ie, they are better off subsidising these passengers by a couple of
quid as they do now.

And that's exactly what I'm complaining about! Common sense says a
return should cost less than a Travelcard. The fact that it costs more
is **proof** that there's something seriously wrong with the current
system. What more evidence do you need!?!

We would need some evidence. Not "more" evidence, just some evidence.

Let's say that a Z1-Z4 return ticket costs the same as a Travelcard
[1]. What that means is that once you buy a ticket for a four-zone
return, you get anything extra thrown in for no additional cost. Or
another way of looking at it is that the Travelcard is the maximum
fare that they think anyone should be paying, but to price all return
journeys below this would result in some tickets not generating
sufficient revenue to cover costs.

There is nothing wrong with that. TfL can set fares at whatever they
feel is an appropriate level to manage demand. If they decide to offer
an effective discount on multi-use tickets, that is fine - it
encourages multi-modal PT usage, and it encourages passengers to buy
multi-modal tickets, which reduces the number of tickets sold for the
same number of passenger journeys made.

Why? That just gives the transport providers an excuse for not
increasing supply to match demand.

We live in a world that is overdeveloped, in a country that is
overdeveloped. I guess you live in or around London, which means that
you live in a particularly overdeveloped area of our overdeveloped
country.

What I am trying to say here is that we cannot afford to simply go on
increasing capacity willy-nilly to cater for people to travel on a
whim. That is just as true of public transport as it is of road
building. If widening the M25 is bad because it will encourage
profligate car use, building Crossrail is equally bad because it will
encourage profligate rail use.

We could cater for a never-ending increase in demand for peak-time
services. The more trains run at peak times, the greater the
proportion of passengers will travel at those times. But for the rest
of the day, this additional capacity will be sitting idle. We will
have used vast quantities of resources - and huge sums of cash - to
build a system that is hardly used for 20 hours a day. What a waste.

Instead, we should encourage people to spread their travel where
possible. By using ticketing systems to manage demand, we can make
much better use of the existing capacity, meaning lower fares for
everyone, by providing incentives for passengers to travel off-peak.
There will come a point when no more passengers will change their
travel plans - either because the off-peak trains are just as crowded,
or because their journey needs are inflexible - at which point, steps
must be taken to increase capacity.

But there is no point at all in increasing capacity for four hours a
day when that demand can be shuffled onto services with seats to
spare.

It works both ways. You can't aid the children without also
penalising the adults.

How many children buy their own tickets?

OTOH I'd say the fact that it doesn't have any demand management
nonsense is a big advantage of my scheme. It gives the transport
providers some incentive to actually improve the supply of transport
where it's needed most, instead of discouraging customers from
travelling. (E.g. if London had had something like that, instead of
zones, maybe we'd have T2K and Crossrail by now!)

Why do you think that? If there was no financial incentive for people
to travel off-peak, but there was capacity off-peak, the railways
would do no more about it than they do now. Passengers could squeeze
on, or they could wait for a seat. So what.

OTOH looking at any map will allow you to estimate the distance and so
give you a fairly good idea of what it would cost.

Not if you look at a topological, stylised map such as used by all
national rail TOCs and organisations, and the London Underground.
These maps have no relationship to ground distance.

Conversely, a map that showed all rail and tube lines with geographic
accuracy would be totally unreadable for central London.

Some people have poor spatial awareness - they would find it difficult
to estimate a distance by looking at a map, even if there was a scale
by it.

Why should we be satisfied by being able to estimate a rough idea of
the cost, at some moderate difficulty for a lot of people, when we can
currently look up the exact fare from a list of six, which far more
people can do far easier?


[1] For example. I have no idea if it is true in London - it is true
on the buses in York, so I'll use that as my model.

--
Stevie D
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