On Nov 19, 6:48*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, MIG wrote:
On 19 Nov, 17:07, Mr Thant
wrote:
On 19 Nov, 16:37, wrote:

I did wonder whether I could touch-in at the Liverpool St gatelines,
and then just leave the journey unresolved as it was the last journey
I intended to make that day.

You get charged £4 when you touch in, even if you've already reached
your cap. This gets reverted to zero when you touch out. The
intermediate validator trick works because it refunds the £4 without
marking you as having touched out.

The way to do it on your journey would be to take the Central Line to
Stratford, touch one of the validators on the platform and take the
direct Stratford-Stansted service to Harlow. You will be defrauding
NXEA of the Stratford-Tottenham fare, of course.

It shouldn't be anything to do with fraud. *It ought to be possible to
get the appropriate fare without doing ridiculous things like getting
off during the journey, particularly if the service is infrequent. This
is only going to get worse and I don't understand why it isn't being
addressed.

I think the strict answer is that the appropriate fare for a journey from
Liverpool Street to Harlow for the holder of a Z1-4 PAYG cap *is* the
price of a single from Liverpool Street to Harlow. A PAYG cap is not a
travelcard, and doesn't entitle you to tickets from a zone boundary.
Rather, it's a form of special offer from TfL - spend a certain amount on
travel on their network, get the rest free.

Consider that if you have a Z12 travelcard, you would be perfectly
entitled to enter the TfL network at Langdon Park and exit it at Finsbury
Park without touching in or out (both stations beingungated, so this is
physically possible). But if you had a PAYG card with a Z12 cap, AIUI, you
wouldn't - you still have to touch in and out, even though you won't be
charged for the trip.

Now, you could certainly argue that the rules *should* allow you to buy
boundary zone tickets on top of a PAYG cap, and if they did, that there
should be a way to use it. But that's a different story.

The other side of the "special offer" is that TfL want to encourage
people to use Oyster, which will ultimately reduce costs,
automatically collect more money and give them comprehensive data
about travel patterns.

People who won't use Oyster get punished for not cooperating*. Maybe
that's fair enough.

But people who are cooperating with what TfL wants, and are using
Oyster for the part of the journey that they can use it for, can't be
persuaded to do any more by being punished. It's more likely to be
counterproductive and leave them feeling ripped off.


*By being charged cash penalty fares way above what cash fares would
have increased to by now.