London Banter - View Single Post - Rail network in London to adopt zonal fares

Mizter T · October 22nd 06, 11:27 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway

wrote:

The cheap day return fares are completely pointless though as a travelcard
would be cheaper. So the actual price would be £4.90 for CJ-FP and £6.30 for
Orp-WH.

Clapham Junction - Finsbury Park should really be £4.30 - a Z2-6 ODTC
(CJ to Highbury and Islington - perhaps changing at Willesden X, then
Victoria Line)

Thinking about this, rolling out PAYG on to NR services will cause all
manner of "valid route" confusion in terms of zones crossed: I know
this has been discussed before with respect to *some* tube routes, but
there would be far greater potential for dispute with the orbital rail
services, even as they are at the moment (let alone in 5 years, if the
current plans are realised).

For instance: Richmond to Maida Vale (do you have to go through Z1)?

Jase

In terms of NR adopting Oyster PAYG I guess how this will work is that
for any A to B journey a fare will be set according to the most likely
route taken - i.e. which zones will a passenger on this journey pass
through. Then if the passenger goes a more roundabout route, avoiding
zone 1 for example, if they touch-in their Oyster at the interchange
points they'll be charged for the cheaper journey.

It's too late for me to start working out elaborate examples. However I
think in many cases a passenger would encounter a set of gates on their
journey - say when changing from NR to the Undergound at termini - that
means this isn't actually as much of an issue as some think.

Off the top of my head I can think of one situation where it would seem
that Oyster PAYG couldn't cope with working out what route passengers
had taken. Peckham Rye is in zone 2 and has a half-hourly service via
Lewisham to Dartford. It also has very regular services to London
Bridge. Let's say a passenger is travelling to Lewisham - as the
passenger can change at London Bridge onto a Lewisham-bound train
without encountering barriers the system won't have any record of
whether their route was via London Bridge - and hence zone 1 - or not.

Any notion that the time-elapsed between touch-in and touch-out would
be IMO impractical - who's to say the passenger wasn't at Peckham Rye
waiting for 29 minutes for the direct train. So I guess the solution is
simply that the cheaper journey prevails, regardless of the actual
route taken.

Of course it gets much more complex when you consider the journey might
start and finish elsewhere - say Tulse Hill to Blackheath. Did the
passenger go via London Bridge or not? Perhaps once again the
presumption must be made that they took the cheaper route.

Perhaps the solution for this is to require passengers using PAYG to
touch-in at every interchange station. For many journeys this might not
be strictly necessary for the system to determine the route taken, but
for others it would be necessary. This could be explained to passengers
thus "Please touch-in at every interchange to ensure you recieve the
best fare". If they didn't touch-in at the interchanges then by default
there'd be charged the more expensive fare.

If this was how the system worked then it still wouldn't know which was
the route taken for a Peckham Rye - Lewisham journey (that would just
have to be charged as a zone 2 only journey), *but* for a Tulse Hill -
Blackheath journey the presumed route might well be via London Bridge
(and thus zone 1). A passenger could override this by changing at
Peckham Rye and touching in there, thus they wouldn't get charged for
zone 1.

There are I'm sure people working on this now at TfL - I just hope that
they have a good idea of what they're doing and are going to be
consistant in it's implementation, and they don't bog it up.