Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:25:20 -0800 (PST), Mizter T
wrote:

I cannot envisage a scenario where passengers had
to touch-out when they exited the bus as being remotely workable
whatsoever, so that's not really what I'm asking about.

As mentioned, it is entirely workable and is implemented or about to
be implemented like that in a number of countries. Indeed, with
London-style split entrances and exits it is dead easy to implement
and glaringly obvious as to the purpose of each reader.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:38:10 +0000, Paul Corfield
wrote:

The early promotional videos from Transys showed a Dart minibus in
deepest Merstham with a ETM plus a validator whereby passengers could
select their fare and then tap their card. The driver could also set the
fare for deduction via the ETM. You don't need to be a genius to spot
some potential loopholes with such a system. I believe the system can
deal with more than one fare as that was certainly in the spec when I
was around and it would be nonsensical for TfL to have taken such a
function out of the system. Paper tickets were also considered as being
necessary to give people confidence that the electronic system had
deducted the correct fare - thankfully that aspect was never
implemented!

It is in Milton Keynes, where you are even issued a ticket if you
"validate" a smartcard season ticket. One of the real oddities of
that system.

I take your point about the efficacy of such a system in a somewhat less
compliant society like London. Obviously part of the success in
Singapore is the "controlled" nature of society and a social sanction if
people were to cheat.

I think the easy way to make it work would be to, as I mentioned
elsewhere, charge the card with the maximum fare for that bus journey
and refund the difference on exit. Thus, anyone failing to touch out
would only disadvantage themselves, and anyone touching out before
alighting would just have to be caught by the same mechanism as anyone
who currently boards a bendy bus without touching in, or in other
locations someone who pays the minimum cash fare and rides the whole
length of the route.

One of the great things about smartcards implemented in this way is
that GMPTE and the likes could go ahead with it now without
harmonising any fares at all, having the card initially purely as a
convenience thing (like it was in London to start with). Singapore,
for that matter, has two main bus companies with totally different
fare structures.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:31:37 -0800 (PST), Mizter T
wrote:

It is for the very reason that passengers would be tempted to override
- which is really just euphemism for saying 'go where they wanted to
all along but don't pay for it' - that I find it difficult to imagine
such a system working in London, or indeed elsewhere in the country.

I really don't see it being any more of an issue than over-riding on
paper tickets is. If you made it so that once you touched out you
can't touch back in on that bus without speaking to the driver, I
think it would be unlikely to be any more of a problem than it already
is.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:35:34 GMT, Neil Williams wrote:

I think the easy way to make it work would be to, as I mentioned
elsewhere, charge the card with the maximum fare for that bus journey
and refund the difference on exit. Thus, anyone failing to touch out
would only disadvantage themselves, and anyone touching out before
alighting would just have to be caught by the same mechanism as anyone
who currently boards a bendy bus without touching in,

i.e. none at all?

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:23:38 +0000, asdf
wrote:

On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:35:34 GMT, Neil Williams wrote:

I think the easy way to make it work would be to, as I mentioned
elsewhere, charge the card with the maximum fare for that bus journey
and refund the difference on exit. Thus, anyone failing to touch out
would only disadvantage themselves, and anyone touching out before
alighting would just have to be caught by the same mechanism as anyone
who currently boards a bendy bus without touching in,

i.e. none at all?

Inspectors operate from time to time on the bendies, though admittedly
not often enough. That said, if TfL catch 1/20 of the people who fail
to touch in, they don't come out any worse off in a sense. (This is
one of the ways Penalty Fares work - you set them effectively at a
"market" level whereby if you catch the likely percentage of people
you won't lose overall).

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

MIG wrote:

On Jan 25, 9:31pm, Mizter T wrote:

two long, comprehensive posts cut

The idea of a rebate if one transfers to another bus is an interesting
one - there are occasionally discussions here about whether free bus
transfers in London would be a good idea , perhaps instead a half-
price second bus fare might be an idea. The idea of free bus travel
before or after using the Underground also gets raised from time to
time - for a bus to Tube transfer this would take the form of a
rebate, applied on exit from the Tube.

On this particular point, I am not quite sure what the situation
currently is anyway.

If, for example, you touch on route 555 and it breaks down or stops
short so that you get the next bus on route 555 where you get
inspected ...

You're supposed to get a transfer ticket from the driver of the first
bus. I think they scan your Oyster to check that you have properly
paid the fare before issuing you with a transfer ticket. If you have a
paper ticket bought on board the bus then again I understand the
proceedure is that a transfer ticket should be obtained.

I don't know whether transfer tickets are supposed to be issued when
the bus was advertised as stopping short of the normal destination.

I have also been on a bus which was turned short by a service
controller, and all passengers were merely escorted from one bus to
the other (which was just in front) by that controller without any
rechecking of tickets by the second driver - we were just waved on -
which of course is a sensible course way of doing things in such an
event.

A friend has also told of a couple of recent-ish occasions when the
bus they were on was turned short without a service controller present
(late in the evening) - so I presume the instructions were issued by
radio - and they didn't obtain a transfer ticket, but merely got on
the bus behind and after a quick explanation were waved on by the bus
driver. The fact that the other bus that had been turned short was
still in the bus stop would have helped this second bus driver realise
what was going on - and of course they may have also had radio
communications about it.

That does sound like an occasion when transfer tickets should have
been issued/obtained - but the truth is most passengers aren't aware
of the transfer ticket system. I think perhaps it would be a good idea
if bus drivers were more upfront in communicating this to passengers.

When it comes to bendy buses, then I don't know whether technically
the rules are any different. However I have certainly been on bendy
buses a number of times that have been turned short, and when this has
happened and I've paid using Oyster PAYG I've simply got on the next
bendy bus of the same route number and not touched-in. I think this is
absolutely fine given that I had already paid for a journey to
destination Z yet I'd only been taken as far as Y. I'm pretty sure
I've had my ticket inspected after this has happened and there wasn't
a problem. I don't recall anyone obtaining transfer tickets from the
bendy bus driver on such occasions either.

I don't know what the situation is when a bendy bus is only advertised
as going so far, but not to the normal end point of the route - though
on such occasions I really don't think it would be an issue if
passengers transferred from the terminating bus to one behind that was
going all the way. I may have done this myself, I really can't
remember. Next time I see some RPIs on board a bus I shall ask them.



Does each bus have its own ID so that the inspector can tell that you
touched on that particular bus, or does the reader just show that you
touched on route 555 within the allowed time?


I've no idea - I'd be interested to know what the situation was. Each
bus ticket machine (or ETM - Electronic Ticket Machine?) must of
course have a serial number of some kind which is recorded on an
Oyster card when it is touched-in.

I've seen RPIs using different handheld Oyster readers, and I
understand some are more sophisticated than others, and so can display
more comprehensive data. The typical handheld Oyster reader I see used
looks much like a pocket calculator, and has a small LCD text display
and also a red and green light. I presume that it is programmed with a
few parameters, such as what bus route the RPI is inspecting, and it
then gives a green or red light when the Oyster card is inspected.
I've seen someone get done because they didn't have enough PAYG
credit, and the RPI was able to display the last time the Oyster had
been used properly - in this instance on a bus the previous day.


In general, unlimited travel for a period of time is easier to enforce
than a (possibly unjust) charge per vehicle regardless of distance.
(I remember a combination of metro and bus being allowed in Lille in
the 1980s within an hour of clunking the ticket.)


Hmm, maybe. Of course the London bus fare model is the same as in
(much of) the rest of the UK, where in essence one pays a fare for a
journey on one particular bus. It can serve as an incentive to
passengers to get a through bus for their journey, rather than
chopping and changing which one could argue slows things down. That
said of course so many people are using passes or will expect to reach
a daily cap when using Oyster PAYG that this only works to an extent.
Nonetheless, when I've been using Oyster PAYG I've certainly waited
for my through bus, and I know many others who do the same, because I
don't see the need to pay the extra for a second fare for that
journey.

Whether there should be free or reduced rate transfers to another bus
is of course a discussion that often comes up on utl.


Whatever the answer about bus IDs, it must be impossible to enforce on
the DLR and, in fact, why should you be charged double on your journey
from Shadwell to Greenwich just because you want to do some shopping
at Canary Wharf Tescos on the way (within the time)? If you drove,
you wouldn't use double the petrol.


I think the rules are pretty clear that one should touch-out at the
end of the journey, and touch-in before you start the next - so in the
case of leaving Canary Wharf DLR station to go shopping at Tesco's one
is leaving the DLR network and should touch-out.

That said, I'm of the fairly strong suspicion that if you did this you
would still only get charged for one through journey. My reasoning for
this is that the Oyster readers at DLR stations cannot determine
whether or not you are entering or leaving the network with certainty,
unlike entrance and exit gates. Therefore I think that they might well
presume you were touching-in mid journey when you changed from one DLR
train to the other.

I'm curious about that, not least because it is very much a real world
scenario, so I will try to give it a go myself sometime soon.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On 26 Jan, 14:54, Colin McKenzie wrote:
Mizter T wrote:
This has got me wondering about the notion of a similar hierarchy of
bus services in London, with more expensive 'premium' routes - perhaps
express routes. That said, there are only two express London buses
routes these days - the X68 and the X26 - and it's only really the X68
that is aimed at commuters.

607 (express 207/427)

When I first moved to Ealing I was rather surprised that you didn't
have to pay extra to go on this, having been brought up with Greenline
coaches. Both rely mainly on fewer stops rather than faster driving to
save time.

Colin McKenzie


Indeed, good point - I'd forgotten about the 607. Of course that whole
busy bus corridor up the Uxbridge Road was a good part of the impetus
behind the now dead West London Tram scheme.

AFAICS charging a premium fare on the 607 wouldn't produce any
benefits, but would instead produce the disbenefit that more
passengers would crowd onto the already heavily laden routes 207 and
427.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On Jan 27, 1:33*pm, Mizter T wrote:
MIG wrote:
On Jan 25, 9:31pm, Mizter T wrote:

two long, comprehensive posts cut

The idea of a rebate if one transfers to another bus is an interesting
one - there are occasionally discussions here about whether free bus
transfers in London would be a good idea , perhaps instead a half-
price second bus fare might be an idea. The idea of free bus travel
before or after using the Underground also gets raised from time to
time - for a bus to Tube transfer this would take the form of a
rebate, applied on exit from the Tube.

On this particular point, I am not quite sure what the situation
currently is anyway.

If, for example, you touch on route 555 and it breaks down or stops
short so that you get the next bus on route 555 where you get
inspected ...

You're supposed to get a transfer ticket from the driver of the first
bus. I think they scan your Oyster to check that you have properly
paid the fare before issuing you with a transfer ticket. If you have a
paper ticket bought on board the bus then again I understand the
proceedure is that a transfer ticket should be obtained.

I don't know whether transfer tickets are supposed to be issued when
the bus was advertised as stopping short of the normal destination.

I have also been on a bus which was turned short by a service
controller, and all passengers were merely escorted from one bus to
the other (which was just in front) by that controller without any
rechecking of tickets by the second driver - we were just waved on -
which of course is a sensible course way of doing things in such an
event.

A friend has also told of a couple of recent-ish occasions when the
bus they were on was turned short without a service controller present
(late in the evening) - so I presume the instructions were issued by
radio - and they didn't obtain a transfer ticket, but merely got on
the bus behind and after a quick explanation were waved on by the bus
driver. The fact that the other bus that had been turned short was
still in the bus stop would have helped this second bus driver realise
what was going on - and of course they may have also had radio
communications about it.

That does sound like an occasion when transfer tickets should have
been issued/obtained - but the truth is most passengers aren't aware
of the transfer ticket system. I think perhaps it would be a good idea
if bus drivers were more upfront in communicating this to passengers.

When it comes to bendy buses, then I don't know whether technically
the rules are any different. However I have certainly been on bendy
buses a number of times that have been turned short, and when this has
happened and I've paid using Oyster PAYG I've simply got on the next
bendy bus of the same route number and not touched-in. I think this is
absolutely fine given that I had already paid for a journey to
destination Z yet I'd only been taken as far as Y. I'm pretty sure
I've had my ticket inspected after this has happened and there wasn't
a problem. I don't recall anyone obtaining transfer tickets from the
bendy bus driver on such occasions either.

I don't know what the situation is when a bendy bus is only advertised
as going so far, but not to the normal end point of the route - though
on such occasions I really don't think it would be an issue if
passengers transferred from the terminating bus to one behind that was
going all the way. I may have done this myself, I really can't
remember. Next time I see some RPIs on board a bus I shall ask them.



Does each bus have its own ID so that the inspector can tell that you
touched on that particular bus, or does the reader just show that you
touched on route 555 within the allowed time?

I've no idea - I'd be interested to know what the situation was. Each
bus ticket machine (or ETM - Electronic Ticket Machine?) must of
course have a serial number of some kind which is recorded on an
Oyster card when it is touched-in.

I've seen RPIs using different handheld Oyster readers, and I
understand some are more sophisticated than others, and so can display
more comprehensive data. The typical handheld Oyster reader I see used
looks much like a pocket calculator, and has a small LCD text display
and also a red and green light. I presume that it is programmed with a
few parameters, such as what bus route the RPI is inspecting, and it
then gives a green or red light when the Oyster card is inspected.
I've seen someone get done because they didn't have enough PAYG
credit, and the RPI was able to display the last time the Oyster had
been used properly - in this instance on a bus the previous day.



In general, unlimited travel for a period of time is easier to enforce
than a (possibly unjust) charge per vehicle regardless of distance.
(I remember a combination of metro and bus being allowed in Lille in
the 1980s within an hour of clunking the ticket.)

Hmm, maybe. Of course the London bus fare model is the same as in
(much of) the rest of the UK, where in essence one pays a fare for a
journey on one particular bus. It can serve as an incentive to
passengers to get a through bus for their journey, rather than
chopping and changing which one could argue slows things down. That
said of course so many people are using passes or will expect to reach
a daily cap when using Oyster PAYG that this only works to an extent.
Nonetheless, when I've been using Oyster PAYG I've certainly waited
for my through bus, and I know many others who do the same, because I
don't see the need to pay the extra for a second fare for that
journey.

Whether there should be free or reduced rate transfers to another bus
is of course a discussion that often comes up on utl.



Whatever the answer about bus IDs, it must be impossible to enforce on
the DLR and, in fact, why should you be charged double on your journey
from Shadwell to Greenwich just because you want to do some shopping
at Canary Wharf Tescos on the way (within the time)? *If you drove,
you wouldn't use double the petrol.

I think the rules are pretty clear that one should touch-out at the
end of the journey, and touch-in before you start the next - so in the
case of leaving Canary Wharf DLR station to go shopping at Tesco's one
is leaving the DLR network and should touch-out.

That said, I'm of the fairly strong suspicion that if you did this you
would still only get charged for one through journey. My reasoning for
this is that the Oyster readers at DLR stations cannot determine
whether or not you are entering or leaving the network with certainty,
unlike entrance and exit gates. Therefore I think that they might well
presume you were touching-in mid journey when you changed from one DLR
train to the other.

I'm curious about that, not least because it is very much a real world
scenario, so I will try to give it a go myself sometime soon

On one hand this is a technical question about which I too am curious,
although not sure I want to risk the cost of finding out the wrong
answer, so I hope you'll post the answer when you find it ...

On the other hand, though, there's a general issue about competing
with the alternatives, eg the car.

Stopping to do something (or just have a rest) during a journey is a
perfectly common and reasonable thing to do. If you do it on a car
journey, you don't get charged double, and there's no reason why you
should be. It's potentially a disincentive to using public transport.

The unfairness of being charged per vehicle rather than between start
and end points was largely done away with in London through the
introduction of travelcards, but it has now been partially
reintroduced with the introduction of PAYG as the alternative to the
travelcard.

You need to keep well below the cap for PAYG to be cheaper than a
weekly travelcard, so it is a real issue.

For example, if I am not using NR during a particular week and do
absolutely nothing at evenings and weekends, I might just about get
away with a comination of DLR and LU costing £2 each way, ie £20 a
week, less than a zone 1 and 2 weekly travelcard.

If I pay £1 extra per day for stopping to shop, it's now gone over the
cost of a weekly zone 1 and 2 travelcard, and that's before weekend
travel, evening bus trips, NR journeys etc etc.

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On 27 Jan, 15:31, MIG wrote:
Stopping to do something (or just have a rest) during a journey is a
perfectly common and reasonable thing to do. *If you do it on a car
journey, you don't get charged double, and there's no reason why you
should be. *It's potentially a disincentive to using public transport.

I count fare capping as Oyster's alternative to transfer tickets. If
you make 3 bus journeys in a day (well, 3 and a bit now), you aren't
charged for any more. On a transfer system, it's usually make one
journey, don't pay for any more for two hours. I think I prefer the
Oyster approach.

U

--
http://londonconnections.blogspot.com/
A blog about transport projects in London

Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
 

On 26 Jan, 14:54, Colin McKenzie wrote:
Mizter T wrote:
This has got me wondering about the notion of a similar hierarchy of
bus services in London, with more expensive 'premium' routes - perhaps
express routes. That said, there are only two express London buses
routes these days - the X68 and the X26 - and it's only really the X68
that is aimed at commuters.

I'm not sure what the OP meant by commuters then - the 726, now X26,
always seemed to have more airport workers than airline passengers
using it.

Hth

Henry