Closure of ticket offices and changes to ticketing

Can you post a link re the announcement on phasing out of Oyster Cards please as I can't find one

Heathrow always had plenty of Scottish notes through the ticket office from the early flights from Scotland. As they are not legal tender they had to be banked separately and not returned as change.

Legal tender is practically irrelevant to most situations anyway, including on the railways. LUL could put up a sign which says "We accept all notes, except BofE £5 issued between 2002-2005, unless it's a Wednesday" or something similarly obscure, and it would be legal. However, it would be distinctly out of joint with the spirit of providing a service, especially at touristy places.

Will these "travel centres" proposed allow season tickets to be purchased, or will thousands of employers have to find a new way of paying employees season ticket loans?

Didn't TfL buy out the Oyster brand or something a few years ago? There was some form fo change in relationship between the two to save money...

Mind you, other metros in the world manage to get by without ticket offices.

Last year I was in Singapore and managed to buy tickets from the machines without too many problems. There were no ticket offices, but they did have staff by the machines helping customers. That sounds very familiar to what LU are proposing.

Whilst the BBC say all ticket offices will close, the Evening Standard on Thursday said 125 offices will close and there will still be many central London offices that remain open e.g. King's Cross

100k per day is not such a small figure and that does not include the information we give at ticket offices. I work at a large tube station which is next to a large bus station, most of our customers are actually bus users too, many of whom are not very mobile and english not being their first language. i understand the need to close the underused offices but my office is far from underused...

The all night running is just to bring the public on side in face of these cuts, and is a diversion to the real issue which is a massive cut to station staff numbers as well a hammer blow to our salaries and conditions.

At my station the ticket office has a healthy footfall, but will be closed. Why? Why move the clerks from the ticket office, where they are.... to use the cliched lingo 'visible and available' and put them on the gateline? A lot of our passengers pay cash, English isn't their first language, and they prefer dealing with a person and not a machine. As to the ticket machines, in my 11 years working for LU, I have found them to be unreliable and they fail on a daily basis.

As for contactless cards. If there is an issue with them, staff won't be ble to help. We can only refer them to their bank, this will lead to more grief and possibly an increase in staff assaults. LU has done its best in reducing the role of the ticket office. Severely restricting opening hours, freezing recruitment, issuing diktats to clerks that they can't do this and that, basically limiting customer choice and forcing people to use the machine, the minimum top up of £5 being the more 'memorable' one. They then have the cheek to say no one uses the ticket offices!!!

I am not saying all ticket offices should be open throughout the day, but the wholesale closing of them is a dangerous move, and against the wishes of the travelling public.

All station grades are being abolished, and replaced with new grades. This goes way beyond ticket offices. Whilst some staff will be promoted to the new grade, the vast majority won't be and will be demoted, thanks to the new grade system, and take a big cut in pay. Protection of earnings for 3 years means we will lose the difference over 3 years rather than one fell swoop, which is something. But it's still a massive difference.

As for me, if I apply and don't get the new proposed grade of Customer service supervisor, I will be demoted by two grades, as my current grade will cease to exist, and I will be made a Customer service agent, the equivalent of today's customer service assistant which pays 8k a year less.

There is more to this than closing ticket offices. Staff are prepared to change their location and the nature of their roles, but to take a massive pay cut as well?!

I am not aware that TfL have announced the removal of Oyster Cards. TfL have committed to the London Assembly to retain Oyster Cards alongside the use of other media like bank cards. Any suggestion that TfL were withdrawing them would have brought forth a torrent of criticism which I have yet to see.

It is worth bearing in mind that no one has a clue how well or badly contactless bank cards will work on the TfL rail and national rail network in London. It is almost entirely dependent on people being persuaded that it is somehow more convenient and reliable. I think that will take some time to achieve because people will want to tread carefully until they understand how their personal finances will be affected by TfL taking money from their accounts. The Mayorwatch blog recently had an article which set out the five phases of the TfL Future Ticketing Project and as part of that TfL confirmed to the blog that Oyster would NOT be withdrawn.

I have no doubt that TfL would like to transfer a lot of Oyster transactions to bank cards and will try to push things that way but they cannot force the system on people if the banks refuse to issue the cards and therein lies the problem. I suspect TfL want to be able to vastly scale back the extent of Oyster transactions and processing so that a step reduction in costs can be achieved. I expect that concessions and discounts will continue but on an account basis for bank cards users. They will be required to register their railcard or whatever on their TfL account and the discount will be applied to any charges incurred from using a bank card. This will be handled via the new "Back Office black box" processor invented to capture and process all the bank card "touch ins and outs and pink validator touches". All the system does is use the bank card as a form of token to record entry and exit and the black box and account details have the info that Oyster Cards currently have encoded on them. I think that is how it is designed to work - I'm not privy to any internal details these days.

They could also change when shifts change to a more transportation sensible: 07:30-15:30 / 15:30-23:30 / 23:30-07:30(next day).

"07:30-15:30 / 15:30-23:30 / 23:30-07:30"

Those three time are all rather unattractive times to change shifts. As noted, the first is during the morning peak, the second is roughtly school kick-out time, and the third will be just in time for the libation express! Move each back by and hour to an hour and a half and it might work a bit more smoothly?

One wonders whether there would be any merit in overlapping the shifts by half an hour to give time for a 'debrief', as it were. However this would lead to an increase in working hours and work-time related problems.


Its been pointed out before, but its ironic that things are now turned on their head from the previous vision. At first there were people on the platform-side and in the office, then to save mooney the platform-side people mostly went and the office people took on the roles in addition. Now its almost as if they wish they had never got rid of the platform-side people, and culled those in the office instead!

The whole thing is rather unsuprising. ever since the reduced ticket office hours came in a few years back, staff on quiet stations have privately complained that there are times when there is nothing to do, even though, say, passengers still want to buy a ticket from the ticket office or fix something on their oyster but cant because its closed. If they really wanted a fair way of counting the true need for a ticket office they would keep a tally of everytime someone approached a window requesting a function that a machine couldnt do. That would be open to massive abuse though.

How are staff milling around on platforms in future going to protect themselves from the elements and physical abuse? Will we suddenly see GLAPs springing up all over the place? If only there was somewhere where staff could sit waiting to be of service, perhaps with a desk to enable them to do administrative work, a chair and kettle to keep them comfortable, and maybe a window so people can see they are available? Ideally it'd be prominantly marked in each station, so passengers/customers know where to find staff for assistance.........

I suspect that the bus cash removal is a tester to see how it is before rolling it out across the TFL network, but this is probably some way off

I'm sure the LU ticket machines will take cash for the for seeable future.

Saying that, earlier this afternoon I went into our local one stop council office to buy some rubbish bags.

They only cost £3.70, so I whipped out a fiver to pay for them. However, the woman behind the screen said they didn't take cash, it was card only. It seems the move towards a cashless society is marching on, certainly for larger organisations.

Having now seen first hand the Octopus card in action in Hong Kong, the Oyster comes across as a bit of a missed opportunity and maybe it should be retired in favour of something more standard like the ITSO platform.

Pretty much every major retailer in HK accepts Octopus for payment, and many vending machines are Octopus only. In HK Octopus is the contactless card everyone uses, and it is more widely accepted than the Visa/MC/Amex contactless. Personally I'd say only about 20% of the money I loaded on to the card was spent on public transport. Aside from the convenience of not messing about with unfamiliar coins/notes, it also meant I didn't take the hit on the various non-sterling fees I'd get charged if I used the debit card each time. I understand there were regulatory issues in the UK that caused the project to be filed under 'too difficult', this is a shame as TfL could be earning millions in the small handling fees charged against these non-transport transactions.

As the banks contactless platforms are now well established, and we now have a UK smartcard ticketing standard in ITSO, I can see how the Oyster could be viewed as an obsolete product in the not too distant future.