On 31 Jan, 09:55, MIG wrote:
On Jan 31, 9:40 am, "Peter Masson" wrote:
"Paul Corfield" wrote
I believe, but am not 100% certain, that TfL introduced a rule
concerning "doughnut or polo mint" fraud. In other words people do not
have Zone 1 on their Travelcard but have some of the outer zones. I
believe the system does a secondary check to see if the origin /
destination pair for the journey (which may both be within the zonal
validity of the card) can *only* be achieved by travelling via Zone 1.
If that is the case then a PAYG transaction will be created to charge
for Zone 1 travel.
Clearly it becomes very complex when you have orbital routes that allow
legitimate travel on the TfL farescale that avoids Zone 1. TfL have
clearly decided to allocate particular journeys to zone 1 or non zone 1
fares. In your example your ticket included Zone 1 so the secondary
check for a Z1 PAYG charge was never initiated. As both origin and
destination were within the zones you'd bought then there is no need to
do anything to trigger a PAYG additional charge.
Now that Oyster has been extended to London Overground there aren't many
journeys between Z2-Z6 starting and end points that can't be made by a route
avoiding Z1, and avoiding out-of-station interchanges where touching out and
in would be necessary, even if the route might be very convoluted - St
John's Wood to Whitechapel via Finchley Road, Rayners Lane, Earl's Court,
Kensington Olympia, Willesden Junction, Gospel Oak, and Barking. On PAYG
time outs would no doubt come into effect, and being charged the obvious
Z2-Z1 fare would not be unreasonable, but I can see issues if the passenger
held a Z2-Z5 season ticket on Oyster.
The issues with tweaking the system to cope fairly with the myriad of
possible journeys when Oyster is extended to the whole London rail network
seem to be incredibly complex, especially when LO starts running on the East
London Line, giving even more orbital possibilities, and interchanges which
don't involve a gateline.
It would be a bit unbalanced if touching an outerchange, proving a non-
zone 1 route, doesn't let you off the zone 1 fare where the fare is
defined as via zone 1, but touching an outerchange in zone 1 adds the
via zone 1 fare when the normal fare is not zone 1.
But from other discussion, it seems that once the outerchange
recalculates as a continuation from A to B, it doesn't affect the
basic assumptions about the fare for the route, even though it proves
it one way or the other, so I wonder.
*But* what Paul has said in the past is that this will likely change
as a result of the PAYG system being reconfigured to handle National
Rail journeys - he hinted at that in this thread but he has said so
explicitly beforehand in a past thread - see this post from 12 Jan:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk....7a77e389d447ad
Specifically this bit...
---quote---
Oyster can only deal with one PAYG fare between an origin and
destination at present. There is a further project underway to support
extension of PAYG to NR which will introduce the concept of
intermediate validation to confirm a route and also for more than one
rate between origin and destination pairs to be held.
---/quote---
Under this system going through an OSI aka 'outerchange' - or indeed
possibly just touching on an 'interchange validator' within the
gateline (if there is a gateline) at an outer zone station - would
prove to the system that you did take a non-z1 route and you would
thus be charged accordingly. In other words it would be balanced, and
non-z1 routes would be charged as non-z1 journeys.
(Back to my situation, I also wonder if there would be a difference
between say doing the outerchange at Canary Wharf, indicating a
Stratford/zone 3 route but only touching in zone 2, and doing the
barrier at Stratford, which is actually in zone 3, and therefore
recalculates a continuation from an initial journey which would have
been charged [eg if I left the system at Stratford]).
Sorry I'm being stupid and I'm not quite sure I see what you're
getting at.
If you're suggesting that you might get charged for a zone 3 route if
you went via Stratford and through the 'internal gateline' at the
Stratford Jubilee line platforms, that's an interesting question,
indeed one that was raised by Paul C upthread. It's also a highly
unusual situation, as it's the only 'internal gateline' out there [1].
The answer is to try it, I guess!
-----
[1] The gateline at Southwark tube station's direct entrance/exit from
the Waterloo East platforms isn't an 'internal gateline' per-se, more
just a gateline that controls access to the LU fare-paid area - it
doesn't do any revenue control duties for National Rail, and there are
sometimes Southeastern ticket checkers are stationed on the other side
to check if you have a valid ticket for NR.
I can nonetheless see a unique situation where people could get stuck
in a no-mans land after exiting the LU fare-paid area without holding
an NR ticket (the signs on the exit from the tube station do say
"ticket holders only", but people don't always pay attention!). I
guess the presence of LU ticket machines provides a sort-of way out,
in that they could be used to buy a Travelcard or otherwise a new LU
ticket to re-enter the tube - that's if the Southeastern ticket
checkers (if present) were to allow them to do this, which I imagine
they would. (This entrance to the tube station does have an LU ticket
office but it's no longer staffed.)
When NR eventually accepts Oyster PAYG then I think these gates will
probably have to be re-configured to allow for this, i.e. as well as
providing an exit from the Tube they'd provide for an entry onto NR
and vice-versa (they'd essentially be configured for interchange
traffic).