fare dodgers
 

Wolfgang Schwanke wrote:
Hello again,

during my last London trip I witnessed a group of police and LU staff
"guarding" the exits of the station. They caught one man just coming
out of the station when I was there, he seemed rather upset (I didn't
see how he got through the fare gates). Also inside the station I saw a
policeman taking down the ID of some passenger. My interpretation was
that they were on hunt for fare dodgers.

The part I don't understand is why they do this in the first place. I
thought the LU system is rather "fraud safe". You can't get in or out
of the system without some form of valid ticket (except by climbing
over the gates or taking a detour to a DLR station), so hunting down
fare dodgers should be pointless. What am I missing?

The event was in Archway BTW.

You'd be surprised. Recent stats show that about 2.6% of journeys on LU
are made without a valid ticket (which includes adults using child
tickets, people travelling outside the zones of their ticket etc).

This amounted to a loss of about £1.86m of revenue over the four weeks
to 6 January 2007. (This information is from a recent answer in Mayor's
Question Time.)

--
Dave Arquati
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London