On Mar 6, 1:00 pm, "Andrea" wrote:
I have travelled several times on the Silverlink Gospel Oak to Barking
service in the past fortnight. What has shocked me is the apparent
large-scale fare evasion on this route.

I imagine most legitimate travellers will have period tickets, and
therefore it will be pretty hard to judge whether or not they are
evading fares.

There is always a guard present on the train but he/she never
materialises to check tickets.

It isn't feasible for guards to do ticket inspections on lines like
the NLL/Goblin, where loadings are tight and stops are only a few
minutes apart - indeed AIUI Silverlink Metro guards aren't even
revenue trained. I'm hoping London Overground will adopt the DOO route
and redeploy surplus guards into revenue protection (given that LO
trains have much the same passenger characteristics as LU, where DOO
works just fine). But RPIs aren't much use when a train is full-and-
standing.

I have heard dozens of people say that
they never buy tickets as there is no deterrent factor (many stations
are open and unstaffed, e.g. Leytonstone High Road).

Dozens? Did you carry out a survey or something?

Access from the
overground to the underground at Blackhorse Road os open, so anybody
can access the underground without a ticket.

....which is useful if they want to go to Finsbury Park, but otherwise
not much help, since every other plausible destination is barriered
during the day (OK, possibly you could go to Chigwell or Chesham).

It really annoys me when Silverlink seems to be doing nothing about
this. Talking to several fare-paying regulars on this line,
ticketless travel is rife.

Silverlink recently imposed a penalty fare scheme, which sounds rather
unlike "doing nothing about this".

Northbound trains in the morning also tend
to be cancelled, leaving many customers unable to board at
imtermediate stations, such as Leytonstone, due to the 2 carriage
train being full.

Northbound? I'd tend to say "westbound" myself... anyway, yes, this
sucks [both the short trains and the relative unreliability] and is a
common problem on NLL/GOBLIN services. I'm deeply sceptical that
better revenue protection would make much of a difference to # of pax
though - how many people genuinely travel in the peak just for the
hell of it?

I hope tFL will take a hard line on the revenut side of things when
they take over this line later this year.

I hope they take a hard line on the revenue issue off-peak, because of
the knock-on security implications (ie antisocialists tend to travel
without tickets, and there are too many of them on the GOBLIN and NLL
- although they wisely avoid peak services). If it's cost-effective to
provide gates etc to enforce payment on-peak, I hope they do that too;
if it isn't then I'd rather they spent our money on improving the
service...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org