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Oyster PAYG and differential bus fares
Paul Corfield wrote: (snip) In the very early days of Prestige (later Oyster) there was no policy decision that TfL would implement flat fares on the bus network. The fare scale at the time had several zonal fare values for adults plus IIRC a flat child rate. There was a huge discussion about the practicality of exit validation but done without active validation by passengers. In other words you effectively walked through a door wide scanner when you alighted and that would read the card and deduct the fare (or add back if a max fare on entry system was used). The problem was that the exit technology was nowhere near mature enough, no one had ever tested such an application and there were big questions about what happened if there was a misread, people had two cards on their person etc etc. 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! My guess is that the reality of making zonal fares work on buses forced TfL into considering flat fares (although simplification had been working its way through LT Buses for several years). This consideration then meshed nicely with the aspirations of the Mayor to drive up bus usage. The rest, they say, is history. To counter the arguments that exit validation can't work and that fare self selection can't work either I would point to Singapore and the EZ Card (and magnetics beforehand). Prior to the EZ Card the bus system had magnetic stored value ticket acceptance but without exit validation. There were huge (for a bus) machines with multiple buttons for the appropriate fare stages. You dropped your magnetic ticket in the machine, pressed for your fare and the money was taken off your ticket and the ticket returned to you. I suspect if you are a regular user then this becomes second nature. As a visitor I found it awful and a real impediment to using buses. There was no issue on the MRT as it was gated and it was like using a magnetic ticket anywhere in the world. With EZ card the self selection has gone and been replaced by smartcard validation on entry and exit. There are two readers at each entrance / exit door so two stream boarding and alighting is possible. You tap your card on entry but nothing is deducted from the card but the entry point is obviously written to the card. All bus stops have a display that shows the number of stages from that stop to all other stops on routes serving that stop. There is also the fare scale based on the number of stages. EZ Card fares are cheaper than cash. When the bus closes it doors and moves off the exit validators are automatically switched off to stop people all tapping their cards and then overriding. I believe the system is linked to GPS or similar as the validators are only reactivated when you are within about 100m of a stop. This is useful if you are already at the exit as you can tap just before the stop and then alight. Others following simply tap on exit. Interestingly the second stream validator at the front door can also act as an exit validator for about 50 seconds once the doors are open or longer at a terminal point where lots of people may be alighting. I have to say I have found the whole system very easy to use and not encountered any problems. I have witnessed others having the odd difficulty at exit rejection but the driver calls them back and will either take a cash fare or else do some reset transaction to allow another go at exiting. I don't understand the technicalities of exactly what happens but it's obviously something Transit link have specified. The Singapore system will not allow you to board if you have negative value on the card - they operate a deposit system which allows cards to go negative but you must then top up off bus or pay cash. Checking the Transit link Guide there is a wide range of fares with some flat fares on feeder routes to MRT stations, distance based, premium fares for expresses as well as differential charges for air conditioned and non air conditioned vehicles (this applies to cash as well - the same concept is used in Hong Kong too). Everyone pays for their travel but there are concessionary cards for OAPS, children and servicemen. This apply concessionary charges for journeys undertaken by bus / MRT. You also get transfer rebates for interchange trips. You can get a rebate for up to two transfers after your first trip provided you board the next vehicle within 45 mins of exit. This applies MRT to bus and vice versa as well as bus to bus. Interchange between MRT lines is free as many metro networks. The rebates aren't huge but it works seamlessly - the display tells you if you've received a rebate. Last transfer has to be within 2 hours of the first boarding - the card reader must look back through journey history to check the timings. In Hong Kong you don't have exit validation but the fares structure employs a tapering effect (and has done for decades AFAIK). The bus system has a hierarchy in HK with feeder routes, local routes, expresses / cross harbour services, routes with sectional fares and premium routes like Airbus. Typically your fare is deducted on entry. However it is perfectly possible to pay completely different fares to get between A and B. A feeder or local service may be flat fare throughout - that's easy the fare value never changes. On other longer routes as well as Cross Harbour routes the assumption is that most people will travel a long distance or across the harbour and the fare is set for that market. You'd therefore be crazy to board such a bus to travel 3 stops down the road as you'd be charged the rate to go 25 stops. However as the bus gets closer and closer to its terminal the fares drop as it can act as a local bus without risking turning away people for a premium fare. For example a bus starts on HK Island and crosses the Harbour and will terminate at a housing development in Kowloon. If you board on the Island you may pay say $8.50, even at the other side of the tunnel it may be the same fare but perhaps within 12 stages of the eventual terminus the fare may drop to $5 to attract some local custom but it's likely that fare will be more expensive that a local bus in Kowloon serving the same stretch of road to the housing development. In the reverse direction the fare of $8.50 would apply all the way to HK Island to deter all local traffic as the major flow is to the Island not intermediately! Confused? A couple of service have sectional fares - this is more like our traditional UK fare stage approach. These run to Stanley from Central on HK Island. These services carry heavy flows to Stanley but provide the only service to intermediate areas. On boarding everyone is charged the Stanley fare but if you get off where a sectional fare applies you tap again on exit and value is added back to your card balance. Bus to Bus interchange discounts are widely offered by the bus operators but Bus - MTR - KCR discounts are not. Prior to the MTR takeover of the KCRC the rail networks were completely separate and there were no through fare discounts. I understand through fares are now being offered and intermediate gatelines are being removed - it's fare to say that the stations were all designed for gated interchange so they avoided the problems we have in London in having to have validators. 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've not seen an obvious fraud taking place but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I think it might be an interesting experiment for TfL to try exit validation on buses to see what the issues might be in a London environment. The final point to make is that you get interchange discounts in Singapore if you change from Hope that's long enough for you! -- Paul C You tapered off at the end somewhat... but never mind that, thanks very much for your very comprehensive and most informative post. The pictures you paint of how things are done in Singapore and HK are great, and rebuff my notion that a system that requires passengers to touch-out would be unworkable. The early Presige idea of a door wide scanner isn't something I had really considered at all - it sounds very sci-fi! As you say it would have presented problems for people carrying two cards, something I have certainly done on numerous occasions. I note that in Singapore, you say there is no fare deducted at all on entry - it all happens on exit. I'm afraid to say (in what is perhaps an illustration of the criminal mindset here in contrast with Singapore!) one thing that instantly sprang to mind was what happens is a passenger doesn't tap out on exit - would they have managed to wangle a "free" journey, or would this discrepancy be flagged up the next time they tried to use their EZ card? 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. I note in HK that there are only a couple of routes - the Stanley from Central examples you gave - where passengers are required to touch- out. I'm afraid again one of my early thoughts is that passengers will be tempted to tap out early then override - and HK doesn't quite have the same societal notions of obedience that Singapore does, so I'm left wondering if that is an issue. I guess the threat of inspectors boarding at any time might be enough to dissuade many from doing that. I note what you say about the hierarchy of bus services in HK, where - apart from the couple of examples as discussed above - flat fares are charged on entry. How good is the fare information given at bus stops - after all, you don't want to end up paying $8.50 simply because you've got on a longer distance bus. Or does the type of bus and/or the colour and branding mean the distinction between longer distance and local buses is pretty obvious? 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 remember reading a past comment on here of how, courtesy of traffic congestion, the X68 wasn't really that expressey, as it were! (I'll try it out some day.) I'm pretty sure that a premium priced air conditioned bus would attract a good bit of custom in the middle of a blistering summer heatwave! I'm not sure whether TfL could really do a proper experiment with exit validation - if there was no incentive to touch-out on exit, then most people wouldn't bother. If however there was some kind of max fare charged, then TfL would be inundated with complaints from people who had been charged the max fare and didn't realise or understand why that one bus route operated differently to every other! If however there was some incentive such as a half-price fare for shorter journeys, then I think you'd find the statistics reporting that an implausibly large number of passengers had apparently only hopped on the bus for a couple of stops! This could only really be countered by extensively deploying inspectors along the route. However confusion would still reign! 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. Still, if it ever was implemented it would provide a fresh bit of material for the perennially grumpy Evening Standard to gripe about. |
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