DfT Consultation on NR Pay as you Go

How would that sort of thing work for those using various discount cards like under 25s, over 60s, Priv, etc.?

Edit: Yes, OK, I should read the document first! There's a small mention of this issue at the bottom of page 16 but no very clear resolution. At least they acknowledge the point.

Getting a discount loaded on to an oyster card is a simple process. All you need is proof of the discount, a ticket machine of the right type (most seem to work fine, but at least one of the ones at Mile End doesn't), a member of staff and not quite 2 minutes.

This is a good proposal but, if the speed of various rail infrastructure projects are anything to go by, I wouldn't be surprised if we rely on mobiles alone to pay for our travel by the time it's been properly debated and implemented. In my travels, I'm seeing more and more people use their phones to pay on rail and buses instead of their Oyster or contactless card. Maybe by the time this is introduced onto the railway, we won't even need phones - just a simple chip in our heads!

With my political hat briefly on, could this be an attempt to snatch away one of TfL’s main USP’s for Rail devolution with regards to an integrated PAYG fares system?

If this goes through, there isn’t much from the passenger perspective that would distinguish it from say London Overground apart from branding and cartography.

Whilst the scale in the UK is greater, I do wonder if anyone has looked at the Netherlands OV-chipkaart. Multiple operators, not just trains but other transport as well, using a smart card system that behaves (to the user) very much like Oyster does in London.

Now, you might say that the Netherlands doesn't have much more population than London (it's roughly double), or that it's much smaller than the UK, or that they had many difficulties making things work. But still - it is there, it does work, and surely we can't be less capable than our Dutch friends, now, can we?

Hitting one of the oldest problems in, well, almost any computer-based system- spec conformance vs actual inter-operability; the industry is rife with examples of this (e.g. OSI vs TCP/IP or iSCSI vs Fibre-channel), the one that inter-operates best tends to be the winner. Of course, that does depend on the vendors wanting to inter-operate, and that's a separate problem.

Your reference to the Dutch system charging based on mileage / route is just one of a myriad range of issues that would arise in a UK system. Our fares structure is vastly more complex than the Dutch one and is riddled with mind blowing complexity. I like to think I'm reasonably intelligent but I can't get my head round the workings of the Routeing Guide that applies to NR journeys. Maybe I've just not dedicated enough time to it but I can't begin to see how you would somehow "encode" that level of complexity into any smart ticket / checking equipment. The DfT premise is that you need fare structure change / simplification to make PAYG work. At the most basic level they're probably right on that. The problems come with how you preserve the best aspects of the paper ticketing system and don't create another ticketing nightmare for passengers. The DfT demand that the balance of financial contribution between fare and tax payers doesn't change is, to my mind, a huge problem. There are charging oddities and inflexibility that could possibly be resolved in whole or in part by some additional revenue subsidy but that's not going to happen if the DfT stick rigidly to their position.

I can just about see how you can have PAYG in the wider South East area. I can also see how you have in main urban areas or, in the North, across two or three Met County (PTE) areas. It does start to become pretty horrible in you stretch that to say Hull or Scarborough from Liverpool / North Wales. It also gets tough, in my view, once you start heading north from York towards Newcastle and Berwick. I know it is the plan for Transport for the North to cover this area with smart ticketing but I'll be amazed if you can use PAYG from Berwick to Liverpool. The walk up Ordinary single for that journey is £96.20 - I don't see how you can structure PAYG as a commercial product to cover that sort of trip without there being huge issues. I suspect all that smart ticketing will do for that sort of trip is that the smartcard simply acts as a receptical for a ticket bought on line / at a machine. IMO you might as well just give people a piece of card. There's no value added.

In the South East it's clear that First Class is slowly being whittled away - especially on commuter routes. On many trains there is now negligible difference (other than price) on the quality on offer. Does a little square of cloth on the headrest and possibly a door dividing you from the "riff raff" in Standard really justify the mark up? Not in my view. Inter City is clearly different and I don't really see how you make First Class work on PAYG for such routes. The obvious way is that you are charged a supplement on board the train when your smartcard is inspected. However given you can easily travel from London to Newcastle and NEVER have your ticket inspected on the train then reliance on such a system would be suspect at best. It's also unworkable on peak time trains that are so heavily loaded that train crew struggle to move around the train. I'm sure some bright spark somewhere already has the "answer" to this issue with some clever box of tricks but all these things rely on human behaviour conforming to design expectations. Sadly doesn't work like that here. In some Far East societies the social norms are a little different which means that the system on HK's East Rail broadly works but even there IIRC there is on board inspection to make sure people have paid the supplement.

I agree that DfT should certainly be actively considering how the Plusbus concept can be ported across (via daily / weekly caps) to work alongside rail PAYG. It should be achieveable in the South East and would be a big plus in some areas like Crawley / Gatwick, Brighton, Reading, Southend where there are still reasonable bus networks that feed the rail network.

I'll stop now as I could drone on about all of this for ages. This is the sort of scheme which my brain would like to have a go at creating.

I'm glad that it isn't just me who has problems with the Routing Guide.

Mention "simplificaton" on some rail forums and wait for the screams. It might stop you doing something "everyday" like taking an overnight break in Scarborough when travelling from Carlisle to Gloucester or travelling from Gatwick to Exeter via Dover. (OK those are exagerations, and not quite as wild as they seem at first sight, but you get the idea)