The last time I got a paper ticket for a TfL journey was at the olympic games in 2012 where I think they gave you one for free if you had a ticket for one of the sporting events.
Other then that I just used my Oyster card. I don't live in London any more, but I've been back for visits/work and I've had no issues using Google or Apple Pay for contactless tap ins/outs - it's all very seamless. It's really impressive tbh and it's a shame this sort of system isn't rolled out to other cities in the UK, or at least is has patchy support.
Checking in and out by phone was recently rolled out nationally in the Netherlands, but at a slightly higher cost than the subscriber's card. It works on every train, metro, tram and bus in the country. The subscribers get the additional benefit of being able to hire bicycles from the train stations also.
My understanding is that that's the same cost as an anonymous blue card, not the yellow card subscribers have, meaning you'll pay the extra 40% on the train for example.
AFAIK this is true if you have the various 'plans' on your personal (yellow) card, which comes with additional cost. The 40% discount is there with one of these https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/
That's super helpful, thank you. I guess for most people not using subscriptions the main reason was the automatic saldo, but now with mobile pay that's not an issue. No need to get your money back either, though I was under the impression that this is now also possible with anonymous cards.
Manchester is slowly limping out the Bee Network (or whatever it's called now) which is modelled on Oyster. Tram and local train journeys can be mixed on a touch in/out system and the buses are to be included as the route contracts end.
I occasionally still use paper tickets, since if you book train travel that requires changing London terminals (e.g. come in through Waterloo, leave from King's Cross) your ticket is valid for the underground connection, and even if you book it digitally it'll give you a reference to collect a paper ticket rather than a QR code for (I assume) that reason. (Yes, I've made the mistake of forgetting/not realising to collect it!)
The message says, in part, "No need to buy a ticket, just tap in on a card reader at the start of your journey and touch out at the end." The article goes on, "The Passenger Operated Machine (POM), to use the TfL name for the ticket machines, doesn’t show the pop-up for every journey that they can sell tickets for because not every destination accepts contactless PAYG tickets."
Does this mean that there are at least three ways to pay: contactless credit/debit card, contactless PAYG ticket, and paper/magnetic stripe ticket? If so, what happens if you use a contactless PAYG ticket to enter a station but find, at your destination, that this ticket is not accepted?
This is in theory a problem with most ticketing systems: people can buy the wrong ticket and then get stuck on the way out. The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true (e.g. enter at Bond St with contactless or a single, go to Reading via Crossrail, go to Manchester via Cross Country). Depending on how naïve one seems and how far one goes beyond the contactless area, staff may be more or less sympathetic, as the sibling comment suggests. We ought to roll out contactless nationally, and hopefully this will happen under British Rail.
Because long distance travel can be very expensive it's trickier to make this work, financially. Suppose I "buy" a TfL Oyster card, use almost its entire balance, then Enter the system at peak time and just walk out (without validating) at some semi-rural station like Amersham. Oyster automatically reduces the card balance by the maximum fare, making the balance negative. Since I walked out without validating it couldn't - even if it were legal (which it isn't) - refuse to let me out, but it can refuse to let me back in.
Oyster will invalidate this card (until I pay off the balance), its balance is now hugely negative, but obviously I'm not going to pay off that balance, so I effectively got (most of) a free journey.
At London scale this feels pretty OK. In London a typical Oyster journey is cheaper than a pint of beer, if somebody "owes" you a pint of beer and then you never see them again you probably aren't bent out of shape about that. But Nationally it's a much greater cost. What if I travel from St Ives to Wick? That's going to be pretty expensive, but somehow we need to accept that I entered at St Ives (maybe for a local journey?) and yet might get out at Wick (the far end of the country) and if I don't have the money for this long journey all of that risk burden lands on... the fare operator? The government? The credit card company? Nobody wants that burden.
This is one of those things where it doesn't actually matter in the long run, as long as most people do not abuse the system. It relies on social cohesion to a point.
So long as the train isn't entirely full and you're taking up a seat that could be used by someone else, the marginal cost (in fuel, maintenance, etc) to the train operator of having an additional person on the train is very close to zero. The train is going from St Ives to Wick anyway; if you do what you describe, the train operator is in essentially the same situation as if you had simply decided not to take the trip.
So as long as the fares that are actually paid are sufficient to operate the train and pay wages to the employees, the train operator can absorb the handful of people who do what you describe. As long as most people don't cheat the system in that way, it's easier to simply ignore.
>So as long as the fares that are actually paid are sufficient to operate the train and pay wages to the employees
That would be a rare exception to the rule. Almost all public transport systems run at a loss and rely on public subsidy; revenues lost through fare evasion increase the burden on the taxpayer.
They do. But their income includes revenue from taxation. Suppose you own a London business. You pay taxes to the local government. In London, these taxes include money for TfL. After all, you chose to put the business in London, a city with a large public transport network, if you didn't like that you could have put your business in, say, Slough, and avoided this cost.
Passenger revenue is TfL's largest source of income by some distance, but it's nowhere close to enough to pay for the entire network, let alone the necessary capital investments to grow and change with the city. And of course if prices went up, ridership would fall, and transport would be diverted to the over-stretched and polluting private transport options which the city does not want.
Denmark's Oyster-ish system covers the whole country. Anonymous cards need a balance of at least 70kr to start a journey, and are limited to a region of the country — e.g. Zealand (Copenhagen's island) and nearby small islands. Adding the non-refundable cost of the card gives an amount larger than the longest journey within that area.
It's possible to set an anonymous card to a high advance payment (600kr = 80€), and then use it to travel across the country.
Great Britain is significantly larger, has much higher train fares, and isn't neatly divided into islands. They could limit it to contactless credit/debit cards, but I don't see a neat way to extend Oyster over the whole country.
The reality is that in the UK as many other places in the world, public transport is highly subsidized. All these little transport fiefdoms and zones aren't accomplishing anything at all. There is no good reason to not have a single payment system.
The Netherlands used to have this system over the full country (OV chipcard) when I lived there (it seems to still exist), the card could be anonymous too.
After the French ticketing system, this felt magical to me.
> Does a paper ticket do anything to prevent this?
Ticket inspectors used to mark the tickets so they'd know if someone was reusing a ticket. Originally it would be clipped, then date stamped, and towards the end on South West Trains it was a scribble of biro (or black marker if you were unlucky).
On the occasional trips I take I now use an e-ticket. I have never had the QR(ish) code on it scanned for validity.
London → Clapham Junction → many more stops → Hassocks → Brighton.
You could buy two paper tickets, London to Clapham Junction and Hassocks to Brighton. Use the first ticket to enter in London, the other to exit at Brighton. This only works if you're confident the ticket won't be checked on the train.
A safer option: buy an open return ticket London → Brighton. The London→Brighton bit is only valid that day, but the Brighton→London bit is valid for 30 days. Get through the barriers at Brighton with a Brighton→Hassocks ticket. Show the return ticket as required to the ticket inspector on the train, and use a Clapham Junction→London ticket to exit the station (the barrier swallows this used ticket).
The first of these is known as “doughnutting” and train companies are cracking down hard on it - there are countless reports of prosecutions on the busiest UK rail forum. They use a combination of ticket sales analysis (because most people do it with the same card and through the same retailer) and CCTV.
> The London→Brighton bit is only valid that day, but the Brighton→London bit is valid for 30 days. Get through the barriers at Brighton with a Brighton→Hassocks ticket.
Wait, if you already have a Brighton→London return ticket, why would you bother to buy Brighton→Hassocks and Clapham Junction→London tickets? Couldn't you just use the Brighton→London return ticket?
This way, you can re-use the return part of the ticket for multiple trips, either until it gets stamped or marked by the ticket inspector, or the 30 days are up.
It would be impractical to roll out nationally without enormous levels of fare evasion. Once you leave London some stations don't have any ticket barriers, most stations will close ticket barriers once the evening peak is over and so on.
Let's say I get on and 'tap in' at London Euston then travel to oxenholme (no ticket barriers, but a 2-3 hour £60 trip) if I don't tap out what should I be charged? This would have to be the same amount as if I travelled one stop on the tube in London and forgot to tap out. What if I tapped in at London got off the train after one stop and tapped out without leaving the station then continued my journey?
What minimum amount should my oyster card (or debit card) have on it in order to take a tap in? It would have to be ~£2.55 as that's the minimum fare; yet once in I could take a £200 train journey.
A big part of why the London system works is that it's quite literally small beer. The journey price range is something like £2.55-£9; in that case you can afford to do all sorts of things like have someone tap in with £2.55 on thier card and tap out with a negative balance, and generally cope with a small number of edge cases and loopholes that are an inherent part of providing contactless travel.
How does that work with paper tickets then? Couldn't you do the same thing of buying a cheap ticket then stepping onto an expensive train? Or is there paper ticket infra that's rolled out everywhere to prevent this?
The prevention is deterrance: because you need to buy the ticket up front, ticket inspectors can check that you have the right ticket and issue fines if you do not. You can cheat (for many journeys you can walk on and off the train without passing through a barrier, especially at odd hours) but you are taking a risk. If there's no pre-commitement to the journey then there's no real deterrent risk.
Is there a person or machine who physically inspects the ticket before you board each train? Or is it that the person who sold you the ticket is probably going to be able see if you physically go to the wrong train for the ticket you just bought and yell if you go to the wrong one? Or is it that for most folks, the act of talking to a physical person keeps them honest even if they could lie and buy a cheap ticket but board an expensive train? Or something else?
The key difference is that the paper ticket specifies the entry and exit stations.
When tapping a smart card you don't specify the exit because that's exactly the thing that makes it a faster/more convenient method of payment. There is no way to check whether you intend to pay until you exit, and then it's already too late unless a physical barrier is present at every station.
There is usually a machine that inspects the ticket on entering the platform. There is usually a machine that inspects the ticket on exiting the platform, and there is sometimes a person walking along the train asking to see everyone's tickets. The machines are backed up by people, if there's no-one manning the line of barriers then they're just left open, and they act as a fallback for damaged tickets and the like, as well as someone you can plead your case to if you've lost it. Generally if you try to enter without a ticket you'll be turned away. Trying to leave without a ticket will be harder without paying a fine, as will getting caught without one on the actual train (again, you can try to plead your case, and there are legimitate reasons like the ticket machine at the station you left from not working, in which case you can buy the ticket at your destination, but you'll need to be believed).
> The message on the machines is a bit misleading because it suggests that wherever one travels behind the ticket barrier will take contactless, which is not true
The article makes it sound like they don't show the message in this case
> The Passenger Operated Machine (POM), to use the TfL name for the ticket machines, doesn’t show the pop-up for every journey that they can sell tickets for because not every destination accepts contactless PAYG tickets, but those that can will get the message. Over time, as more National Rail stations are added to the contactless payments system, the ticket machines will be updated to include them in the messaging.
The message doesn’t say that the option is only available on the selected route.
It’s fair the assume that passengers are going to “learn” about this and try again next time in a different route, only to arrive at a destination that doesn’t support it.
It's not as though it's hard to predict in general. These aren't like "Of 492 stations served by TfL 328 picked essentially at random take contactless but the rest do not". The situation is that all of TfL's stations and all the stations in the region they get to control even if operated by somebody else, take contactless.
There are edge cases, but, they're literally edge cases, they're at the edge. Example, suppose I'm in central London and I want to go to Amersham. That's a Tube station, it's notionally in London for this purpose so my contactless just works. How about if I travel slightly further along that line, to Great Missenden? That's no longer in London, contactless is unavailable.
But, why would I expect Missenden would work? It's not in London, it's not shown on a Tube map or a TfL London map, Amersham is (right at the top left) but Missenden isn't, because it's not in London by this definition, you have finally left.
Could I be confused because I'm on a tube train? Nope. Tube trains don't go that far, they don't go beyond Amersham on that line. Once upon a time you could get tube trains out to Missenden (we're not talking last week, this is when they were steam trains like 60+ years ago) but not any more. So I have to have boarded a full size train, probably bound for Aylesbury, or Birmingham or something, and thought "I bet this is a London train and my London fare system applies". That's very silly.
I find Japan’s IC card system notoriously confusing here with every line operating its own fare gate, the notion of a base fare and additional fare for a line, and entry gates that require you to first walk all the way out to an exit.
These are typically stations that are outside of London. If you reach the destination station, you'd probably need to appeal to the kindness of staff members who attend the ticket barrier (if there is one), who might ask someone to buy a ticket or pay a penalty fare. But it's functionally equivalent to traveling without a ticket at all.
You'd also have to pay a default charge for an incomplete journey on the PAYG ticket, but you could potentially appeal to have this reversed.
It's usually made pretty clear on train announcements that you're leaving the contactless PAYG fare zone.
Because they tell you before you get to the last station in the zone. You can get off, tap out & buy a ticket to wherever you’re going from that station.
Take my routine train home when worked in central London. It's an 1805 from Waterloo towards Weymouth and Poole, in the country's South West. Most people boarding the train at Waterloo are going to be on it for an hour or two, getting home - London's internal fares are obviously irrelevant. But, technically the train is stopping one more time inside London, and thus TfL's Oyster fares are valid for that one stop, at Clapham Junction although as timetabled this train isn't for Clapham Junction, you could leave there and your Oyster would work. This stop is for picking up passengers. Indeed sometimes I might catch my train there if circumstances made it impossible to be sure I'd reach Waterloo early enough.
So there's an announcement. Your Oyster (or contactless) is not valid for travel beyond London, and this train isn't even really for internal travel, but you can leave at Clapham Junction.
I believe the reverse is actually more common - mistakenly touching in with with oyster/contactless for a journey out of zone for which a specific ticket has been purchased.
I've done this myself a couple of times - touching in at my local station whilst half-asleep on a journey to Luton Airport Parkway when on my way to catch an early flight.
What happens then is that TFL record an touch-in without a corresponding touch-out, and so might charge you the maximum fare for an unresolved journey.
They're actually pretty good at fixing that automagically - so if, for example, you've not touched out at a station that had its barriers open due to crowding and make a return journey through the same station later in the day, they'll assume that you exited there and charge you the right fare.
There are lots of reminders, regular travellers know about it, and in my experience there is normally a mildly exasperated member of staff who will help you deal with the situation by letting you buy a ticket.
This would be a smart card that can hold a credit balance and also season tickets, so it is not necessarily PAYG.
However, there are two types of such smart cards, Oyster cards issued by TfL, and ITSO cards issued by other train operating companies. Both can store season tickets for journeys within London. But only Oyster cards can be used for PAYG within London and only ITSO cards can be used for PAYG outside London and store season tickets involving journeys outside London.
Aside from that, QR codes are yet another form of ticket for National Rail trains, and they work in some stations in London and not others.
> Aside from that, QR codes are yet another form of ticket for National Rail trains, and they work in some stations in London and not others.
Which National Rail stations in London don't accept the barcoded tickets? I'm especially curious to know what happens if you attempt to purchase a barcoded ticket ('E-Ticket' in National Rail parlance) to one of these destinations.
The ticket machines at this station are also the same type as in non-National Rail stations, and they do not let you print pre-booked National Rail train tickets.
In my experience, if you try to book a National Rail ticket to West Ham, it will not offer you the option of a barcoded ticket.
> But only Oyster cards can be used for PAYG within London and only ITSO cards can be used for PAYG outside London and store season tickets involving journeys outside London.
Back in 2014 (and possibly still, I no longer live in London) not only was it cheaper per ticket but it was capped per day, so you couldn't accidentally pay for more than the price of a one day ticket. Obviously this is much superior to buying paper tickets for each journey. But I remember having quite a hard time convincing visitors to use their contactless cards on the machines.
Though only on a fixed Monday to Sunday period. So if you arrive and depart mid-week, you might pay up to an additional capping period and buying a weekly travelcard could work out cheaper (provided you know in advance which zones you need).
A travelcard also lets you buy slightly cheaper rail tickets for travel outside of the TfL zones (tickets to/from "Boundary Zone n", with n being the last zone in which your travelcard is valid), whereas with contactless the same trick requires physically getting off the train.
This is awesome. In Canada, GO transit is also capped per day. Unfortunately for me, that cap was something like $20/day when I was really using it frequently.
It seems to me, that the main focus of the article, was talking about how a very simple UI change (a pop-up cancel option) made all the difference.
On the other hand, these types of popups can be incredibly disruptive to the UX, especially if the text is badly written, and there's no clear utility to the user. All too frequently, these types of guardrail popups are there, only to advance the agenda of the developer/service provider, and not the end-user.
It looks like the popup was well-designed, the text was well thought-out, and the user advantage is clear.
Good point, but that is OK. The end user still gets the advantage (so does the TfL, but that doesn't concern the user).
I feel that so many tech companies consider their end-users to be little more than cattle herds (the real product is the company), and they simply don't think about stuff like this.
This kind of usability is a basic, fundamental mindset, that, in my opinion, seems to be severely lacking, in today's tech industry.
Arguably indeed. Depends what is considered the service in this case. I would argue that the service is “using the public transport “, and it is not “using machine for buying paper tickets”.
Perhaps, but there ample room for improvement here.
The text simply say's it's cheaper, but the amount saved is not mentioned. This can be a big factor in changing people's behaviors. I may choose to shop at a local market for convenience, or fly a specific airline to get airline miles. In both cases, I know that I did not pay the absolute rock bottom price, but that the difference is small enough to not deter my loyalty.
Later in the article an example is given: "...Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments" I am unsure how random that example is, but if typical, that is a massive 60% discount. Sharing that sort of precise information would certainly change habits of even the most loyal of paper customers.
It is of course far simpler (and cheaper) from a software design perspective to have the generic message, and perhaps it is all that could be accomplished in the timeframe allotted to the effort, and I understand that. But I do hope that more precise messaging is provided in the future so that we can revisit this discussion and review the results.
One minor problem is that the paper ticket is anytime, but the contactless fare had peak/off-peak fares…
So if you buy a paper ticket at 0925, you’ll pay 6.70 GBP. If you touch in and travel immediately you’ll pay 3.40 GBP (peak fare), but if you stop for a coffee first and the time ticks over past 0930 before you touch in, you’ll get the off-peak 2.80 GBP fare.
(I think there is actually a little grace time, and it may be when you complete the journey which matters, but the principle holds).
The whole UI of that interface looks horribly designed to me, including that pop-up with weird tiny text, huge line-spacing, padding all over the place and left-aligned button text.
The entire thing screams back-end developer forced to make UI :)
> ...an off-peak trip from Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments.
Is the inference that a single magnetic strip paper ticket costs ~£3.90 per printing? Did TfL reduce the volume of magnetic paper it bought (in relation to this change)? I don't see either of these points mentioned, anywhere in the article.
If it's not that expensive to print on magnetic paper, and TfL has not reduced the volume of the magnetic paper it buys (in relation to the change) then the dramatic price fall seems a bit suspect to me - but maybe that's just me?
Might be an economies of scale thing? If you're offering paper tickets you need the machines for them, you need to pay to maintain them, that is a minimum cost that you can't really decrease as usage drops. If one machine is servicing a million tickets, the per ticket cost is negligible; if usage drops and you're trying to split the cost among a hundred tickets, it's going to look extortionate.
It'll be largely down to the costs of continuing to support paper tickets I'd imagine. Virtually everyone uses contactless/oyster and paper tickets are more prone to failure both for the ticket and the scanner in a way that both requires assistance and reduces the capacity of a station to process passengers at peak hours
More countries should adopt the random checking model used in Germany: sometimes ticket inspectors board the train and check everyone's tickets. If you don't have one you get fined on the spot. It saves a lot of expensive and annoying ticket gates.
Two systems in London have this (trams in south London, the DLR in east London) so Transport for London can probably make a good guess at the costs of each method.
Here it's paper tickets by default. There is one primary kind of ticket which you have to stamp at your origin point and it entitles you to move away from that point, anywhere in the city, for the next 2 hours.
The value of having just one kind of ticket (for most uses) with a fixed price is surprisingly high, since you can even pre-purchase a bunch of them if you're an occasional rider. Then riding on the train without a card is: get ticket from wallet, stamp it, wait for train, get on train. The stamping machine doesn't seem very expensively complicated, though it does know the current time to within 15 minutes.
Subscription tickets (monthly fee, unlimited travel) are RFID cards and ticket controllers have suitable readers. Obviously most travelers are ones who travel often and therefore bought subscription tickets, and few stamping machines are needed, for the occasional travelers who didn't. The process is: go to train platform, wait for next train, get on train.
They don't do credit card taps here probably because German people are resistant to electronic tracking of people's movement (you know, after that big thing the government did some time ago). If they did, they'd probably have a place to tap your card in each station to validate it for the next 2 hours, same as a paper ticket, and then the ticket controller's handheld scanner would check where it was last tapped.
For the Croydon Tramlink (the only trams in London) they're not gates, but pillars on the platform. Always open gates would've been an improvement. There's no space for that at many of the stops though, so I get why they've picked the option they have.
It's not just printing, it's maintaining / fixing jams / replacing / etc. for both ticket machines (self serve and staffed machines) and for ticket readers - with business logic being that motivating less use will cause costs to go down, more than (but not excluding) covering the actual running costs of keeping the older technology running.
Additionally (though I don't know that it's relavent to the two figures you quoted), the paperless system is flexible in that it can measure all the journeys you take in a calendar day and then charge you whatever the lowest suitable fee is at midnight - whether that's a single or a return or a day pass or an off peak something or so on. Whereas with paper tickets the person needs to decide up front which option will be cost effective based on the trips they're expecting to take, which often is a cause of paper TFL tickets working out more expensive also.
You can't make any assumption or inference about anything based on the price presented to you in a given context.
This is likely going to be an issue in this year's UK election. The only people who are happy about this is train operators who profit from customers getting bad deals.
Eh, while UK pricing is a mess, charging more for paper than contactless ticketing is a thing just about everywhere that has contactless, to discourage use of paper.
The zone fairs aren't really distance based. The goal is to disincentivise core travel especially in peak, so it's actually cheaper (but of course slower) to skirt around the core when crossing London.
Suppose you enter at Upminster and leave at Moor Park, those are both in Zone 6. But by default the system will conclude that you probably passed through the core (Zone 1) since that's the obvious route and charge you for a journey using zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
If you're on a budget and no time constraint, you can travel to Barking, get out, touch the Pink validator, board a train to Gospel Oak, touch another Pink validator, and now finish your journey to Moor Park, and since you've avoided the core you're charged a significantly lower fare (but this takes much longer).
Before Oyster this couldn't work, you weren't allowed to travel on the cheap fare via the core, but there was no way to detect that you'd done it - the tickets don't know where they are, so people routinely did and may not even have realised what they were doing wasn't legal. But because Oyster (and thus also contactless fare system) knows the journey you made, it can conclude that (unless it saw you at the Pink validator on a different route) you went the obvious way and should be charged accordingly.
For most people this just made things slightly fairer. For a handful of people who liked cheap weird routes or are in no hurry it added a step (touching the pink validator).
You might be able to buy either a peak or off-peak paper ticket, but you have to choose.
If you make the wrong decision, you'll end up paying £3.90 too much. With contactless, you literally can't make the wrong decision (you pay the fare at the moment you're riding the train, so it can charge you accordingly)
Paper tickets are anytime tickets, so charge a premium for the extra flexibility. Whereas the contactless payments take into account discounted off-peak time periods, calculated exactly based on your entry and exit times.
Basically they are different classes of tickets, it's not really to do with the paper.
Eh, it's just to force you not to use paper tickets and clog the machines. If you want to pay with cash, you're supposed to buy an Oyster card (£5) and top it up at the machine or most convenience shops across London.
This effective solution has been in use for a number of years now in cities throughout Czechia, Poland, Romania, Estonia and probably many others around Europe. I wish we could see a faster uptake of this approach in Ireland.
You maybe interested to know the TfL were the first metro system to use this system, they actually developed most of the technology themselves, and now sell it to a number of other cities.
here’s another fun fact: TfL turned on contactless payments for all their stations without any apparent changes in their user facing hardware. one day the same oyster card reader started accepting contactless payments. i’m sure it was not as simple as turning on a switch but it looked that way :)
Yes, but it will inevitably lead to paper tickets being removed completely, which has already happened in some places. That is an absolute nightmare both in terms of privacy and in terms of ceding power to the credit card duopoly.
For the same reason that we need cash, we need to keep paper tickets at least as an option. I'm surprised the sentiment in this thread is so strongly in favor of cards; normally HN is a bit more cash-friendly.
I'm not aware of any plans to do so, not least because while cards have overtaken Oyster for pay as you go, Oyster season tickets / travel cards still remains a very significant use case. As do free / discounted children Oyster cards.
Neither has a credit/debit-card based viable solution at present that'd be tolerable.
That sounds like a bad idea, considering that children and tourists are very likely to not have a credit card (or at least not necessarily a compatible one).
I think the tourists argument is rapidly fally, but not children (though they are available in the UK via providers like Go Henry). Credit/debit cards also won't solve the season-ticket issue.
For what its worth, you can use Leap for Bus Eireann and other services[1].
I think Irish Rail (excluding the Free Travel Scheme[2]) is the hold-out, in rural areas, as Bus Eireann and Irish Rail are the only services available in those areas.
While not the contactless payment scheme inferred from the article, it would still be a viable alternative to paper tickets.
Where would you tap? I used to live near Clara train station in Offaly and there I just... walked on the train. I suppose they could add readers, of course.
Such contactless readers are the norm in the Netherlands. There are no ticket gates; it is still an honesty system, but one is expected to tap on before you board the train. They are sensibly located near the station entrance, so you also don't need to make a detour to find them.
Apparently there are some stations which still have ticket gates, but I haven't seen any in the rather short time I've been in the Netherlands - they seem to be concentrated in metropolitan areas[1], and I've only been in the somewhat more rural[2] province of Limburg. As it happens, though, I have never actually used the OV-chipcard myself, as I always use an Interrail pass when travelling any further than Belgium from my home country of Britain. I just get on the train - even more reason to like the 'gateless' platforms, because it's always the people with less usual tickets like Interrail that fall through the cracks with systems that try to be too clever.
Mallow is in the Cork commuter zone; you can use a leap card there. The issue is more around stations where you currently can’t use a leap card at all.
I've been using contactless for the majority of UK train and tube travel for many years now. Phone is most convenient, but adds a significant stress factor!
You can also setup “Express mode” in Apple Pay that works with TFL. You don’t have to unlock your phone/watch or press anything you just scan it and it works (like a physical card)
No, it will work on power reserve, but it won't (logistically can't) work when you have literally run out.
This ought to be incredibly rare, but if you actually do literally run out of battery (not just it gets to the last few percent) then this technology doesn't work, whereas your bank cards do.
> it won't (logistically can't) work when you have literally run out.
While I believe you're correct for the iPhone, that it won't work, it's actually not as impossible as you suggest. The NFC-capable BlackBerrys that supported the very early tap-to-pay with a phone had the concept of a default card, which could be programmed onto the secure element and would work even if the phone was totally dead (even if the battery was removed). The NFC field was enough power to boot up the secure element, just like it's enough power to run the chip in your bank card when you tap it.
Later phones dropped this support, as it took a bunch of engineering effort and customers largely didn't care. But if customers ever start demanding it, so they can totally stop carrying a bank/credit card, it is possible.
I suspect that the tiny amount of power you can vampire to make NFC work (which is why your contactless bank cards work as you explained) isn't enough for even the basic features we now expect from a smart phone as payment device.
So you'd have to message this very carefully, on top of the engineering effort, and my guess is that in reality "Reserve power" is always enough. If your phone "died" (screen turned off for lack of power) at the party, you have several hours after that when it can still do enough NFC to get on the bus home.
A lot of my friends get anxious at like 10%. Sure, at that point you should probably stop playing Candy Crush, but you're a long way from not being able to tap in to your train home if you stop. Power Reserve seems like a sensible choice to make you stop using the last dregs for frivolities.
We might see this again, as the Pixel 8 Pro has a system like this for UWB so your phone can be located by the Find My Device network after its power is drained.
Agreed, though in case of TfL there isn't actually any app, it's standard EMV and would work with contactless-enabled bank card or mobile wallet emulating a bank card (so built-in Apple/Google Pay).
You can get contactless PAYG prices without any identification in London by using an Oyster card. You can buy them from corner shops without ID, and top them up at the same places with cash.
I doubt this really affords you any extra anonymity though. Tube and rail stations are so heavily covered by CCTV, and the police have many times tracked peoples entire commutes and movement through CCTV only.
To hinder traffic analysis across multiple trips, you should also have meeting where you swap Oystercards with others, similar to how people would (and still do?) swap grocery purchase tracker cards with each other, to get the discount with less surveillance.
You buy paper tickets at kiosk where camera can get close-up view of your face. Cameras can also you track when using the ticket at barrier.
Also, contactless prepaid cards can be anonymous if don’t register them or attach to credit card filling with cash. Can even swap them around with other people.
It's 1970s tech. Even if they had given them unique codes, they had no way of catching duplicates. The magnetic stripe has a very limited amount of storage space and, as far as I know, it's all used for other necessary information.
It also explains why the rail operators are moving to QR codes on paper tickets, which are in every respect worse. (They are absurdly large tickets and take much longer to scan at the barrier, creating queues.)
Anyone else find the "buy ticket" and "cancel" button text confusing? I had to take a second to work out which one was which. I'd try clear text like "buy ticket anyway" and "use contactless".
But "use contactless" isn't what that option does. It cancels your transaction which is why it's labelled cancel.
Suppose I'm at this screen about to get myself a paper ticket to Brixton to see my friend Jim, as this prompt appears I see Jim - oh that's right, Jim is coming here we're not meeting in Brixton. Cancel. I'm not making a journey, I don't want to "use contactless" I want to cancel this purchase, and that's exactly what this option does.
Yes most users who choose to cancel might end up using contactless, but that's not what the choice itself does, it does not, for example, check that you're carrying some form of contactless payment, nor does it charge you for a journey, it just cancels the ticket purchase.
I think in that situation most people would just walk away from the machine. Or try and press the red "start again" button.
Ok, maybe my suggestion is the wrong wording but I still think the original is confusing. If I'm going throught a process and suddenly get a confusing popup I didn't expect, my first instinct is I can press cancel and get back to what I was doing. But in this case it takes me out of the whole process.
But I'm not saying my UI choices are representative of all - really, it's about proper UI testing. The article doesn't say what user testing they did, if any.
I guess this falls into the trap a lot of tech metrics stuff falls into: ok, we can clearly show that sales of paper tickets fell. We assume there is a corresponding rise in card sales (But crucially, the article doesn't prove that). But what none of the stats can clearly show is whether people were happy with all this or not. Maybe they would have preferred the cheaper prices AND a paper ticket.
Can you tap your contactless card at the barriers to pay for several passengers, e.g. by handing the card to the next one coming in? Or this this method only for single travellers?
> You can pay for someone else's travel with your contactless card or device if they're travelling with you. You need to pay for your own travel with a different card or device.
Single traveller per card. You also have to tap out at the end so it can calculate the fare.
If you have more than one card you can let others in your group use those.
Though it’s been a few years since I was travelling with anyone who didn’t have either a contactless card or Apple Pay / the Android equivalent, which also works and is arguably even more convenient.
I saw this message recently and it left me seriously confused. I was in London for about a week with my twelve year old.
For myself, I just swipe my mobile and I am done. For my child tried:
- Registering in the TfL mobile app doesn't work for children
- An Oyster Card for children should exist but we were told to get a paper ticket instead - at multiple TfL counters.
- Tried to swipe twice, for my child and myself. Did not work - unsurprisingly.
- Trying to get a paper ticket for a child leads to the mentioned pop-up, which says: "It's cheaper to use contactless [..] at adult rate [..]". What is that supposed to mean when trying to buy a ticket for a child? Is the contactless adult rate still cheaper than a paper child ticket? If not, then why am I seeing this pop-up?
So for our next visit: What is the proper way to travel with a 12 year old child as a tourist?
There is an Oyster Card for children aged between 11 and 15, but you have to apply for it in advance and supply a photo. I think it's aimed at people who live in/regularly visit London:
Thanks, this is a good summary and is very much appreciated.
If we assume that an Oyster card for children doesn't make much sense for a tourist, I found no option where the child is cheaper than the adult.
Admittedly, most often the difference between contactless for the adult and the pay-as-you-go Oyster card is negligible. Still it is a bit disappointing.
The gates are setup to deliberately limit throughput to prevent overcrowding on platforms or in trains.
If you look around when walk through a TfL station you’ll noticed that all the infrastructure is setup to make sure there’s more provisions for exiting a station, than entering the station. So the gates are setup to have more exit gates than entry gates, escalators set are always configured to have more up escalators than down escalators, routes through the station are more direct for exiting than entering etc.
TfL takes overcrowding extremely seriously, and have loads of provisions and strategies to prevent an overcrowding issue.
Although public transport always caters for paying in numerous ways, it can be hard to get people to change habits and it can be hard to get new customers to pay the 'easy' way. If you don't get a bus very often and don't have cash on your person, it can be worrying or slightly intimidating even if you just have to tap in and tap out. Plus you have to link a payment card to your phone.
Personally I am still a paper ticket person, psychologically I need that bit of paper.
Top tip if visiting the UK and going outside London with a ticket bought online or with an app - always screenshot your purchase!
>To pick a random example, an off-peak trip from Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments.
That's insane. It feels like some kind of dark pattern that they were even offering paper tickets.
“It’s cheaper..” will grab attention. If you write anything thing else in the first 2 words you may not have had the same effect as people’s attention span is low
This is about the tube so none of what you've written here is relevent.
There are of course no "scanners for e-tickets" on the tube and there's no world where buying a physical ticket for a tube journey is faster than using contactless at the gate.
> There are of course no "scanners for e-tickets" on the tube and there's no world where buying a physical ticket for a tube journey is faster than using contactless at the gate.
The lack of scanners at Underground stations is a pain for cross-London journeys -- you can't get a ticket from say Milton Keynes to Tunbridge Wells on an e-ticket because it includes the cross-london element
That's a very fair criticism. They should at least make an eticket version of that route a few quid cheaper and make it clear the journey doesn't include the tube part.
What “TfL trains” are you using that aren’t part of the oyster system and accept QR e-tickets?
Also how is buying a paper ticket faster and easier than just tapping your card at the gate line? You can even wait till you know your train is going to arrive before tapping!
Both Oyster and National Rail tickets are valid on the Elizabeth Line, despite it being effectively part of the TfL network. Should National Rail introduce a smartcard? Probably - but they don't have one yet, so it's not unreasonable that parent would be frustrated by the unreliable QR code scanners.
16 zones limit would not have existed in the first place if they did not insist on keeping all the fare info on the card. Many fare systems do fine with online-only operation.
That was exactly what I expected the article to be about, actually. So there is nothing misleading. (Although I expected it to be about their website, not their ticket vending machines. But that's fine.)
Why has this been voted down? The title is plainly trying to imply that it's a confirmed case where the friction introduced by a popup in the purchase flow has seriously damaged sales. "Led to a significant drop" doesn't imply a commensurate rise in non-paper ticket sales, else it wouldn't be written that way. The title is pure clickbait.
Work from home. While most workers have now returned to the office after the pandemic, a large proportion have done so on a part-time basis. Passenger volumes are below pre-pandemic levels throughout the week, but are particularly low on Monday and Friday.
So, WFH caused a YOY drop from 2022 to 2023, while there was an increase from 2021 to 2022? August 2022 was similar to September 2022 but there was a drop between August 2023 and September 2023 when the change was implemented. WFH?
The TfL ticket machines are a UX disaster. Being a London native I am very comfortable with the transport system and how it works and how to get around etc, but fuck me the machines are an incomprehensible mess. They present so much information at once in small text - this popup is a good example, lots to read but you are in a rush to get somewhere and there are 25 impatient other people in the line behind you.
I now just always tell people to just tap in with their phone.
That does indeed sound enticing, but I also really like the Deutsche Bahn ticket machines: not only do these have options for the most usual tickets, they also have the full journey planner system built in. That means you can purchase tickets valid across multiple fare zones - like the National Rail website in Great Britain, but in a vending machine! Additionally, you can use this to find information in advance, like what the platform for arrival will be, which can save some time when making connections.
If you're going to put a touchscreen on something, you might as well do it properly! :)
I find staff are even better for journey planning. Shame we've mostly replaced them with machines
Now we get to stand there tapping 13 times because the touchscreen sucks. And worry about being taken to court because the machine was broken. Yes "most" people have phones but public transport needs to cater to all
Last ticket machine I used was at Stafford, tap the "Birmingham" button, Offpeak return, tap phone on the pad, ticket prints.
Obviously that one was well maintained as the touchscreen was calibrated correctly. But old machines used to be broken too.
If you want a ticket to say Gloucester from Stafford then it's something like "other, g, l, Gloucester, Offpeak return, tap phone". The old style physical machines wouldn't sell a ticket to anywhere other than a few locations.
The point this story is trying to make is that the machines themselves are unnecessary - just tap in with your normal contactless credit card, debit card, oyster, or phone to get the best fare.
I disagree the machines are not needed. Often when it comes to the railway people argue for things that conveniently ignore edge cases and pretend public transport isn't for all the public. Our railway system is incredibly complicated.
Maybe this is fixed, but they used to not even give you the cheapest ticket in all cases. I've used one for travelling just outside the oyster zone, and it recommended me a ticket that was 2x the price of the daily travel card to that location.
I always say to just use your bank card instead of your phone as that is much faster than phone. Always waiting for people getting there phone ready at the gates.
I mean, if I was running TfL, I might be tempted to make the ticket machines difficult to use, to discourage people from using them. From TfL’s pov, it is always preferable for people to use contactless.
(I was in Lisbon recently, and am convinced that that was going on there; there was no possible reason for the ticket machines to be so awkward to use, other than deliberate deterrence.)
Yeah this info, very condensed, should just be on big signs at station. ”You can just tap your credit card and travel, no need to do anything else at all”.
Which is also how it _should_ work.
Of course seniors, kids, period tickets etc are always going to be messy but at least describe the base case: single journey adult - what do I need to do?
> Yeah this info, very condensed, should just be on big signs at station. ”You can just tap your credit card and travel, no need to do anything else at all”.
This messaging is all over TfL stations and advertising. If you're stood at a London train or Underground stop for any length of time, you're likely to hear the overhead tannoy repeating a message about how convenient contactless cards are, and how they charge the same (cheapest) fare as the official Oyster system.
It's a testament to how hard telling people anything is, that having a popup on the ticket machine is still effective.
I’d interpret ”Constactless card” as some form of RF variant of a traditional ticket card. Not as a way of describing your regular visa/mastercard debit/credit cards. Is “contactless card” a normal way of describing a debit/credit card? Can’t any rf card be said to be contactless?
The big revolution elsewhere was the transition from RF based ticket cards to RF based regular credit/debit cards. They’re both “contactless” though but one is s a hassle.
I never heard the term EMV either and had to Google it now. I think my point is: for signs, use stupidly simple language, understandable by everyone. These signs are for tourists perhaps more than Londoners.
The constant reference to “Oyster cards” for 20 years without specifying that “yeah that’s codespeak for ticket” was a very similar UX failure. They should have called them the 3 seashells…
Everywhere seems to have a name for their equivalent of Oyster cards though. The bay area has Clipper cards, and the seattle area has Orca cards.
Conactless cards includes those (but your Orca card probably doesn't work in London...) and credit/debit cards, and your phone if that's how you roll.
Not every credit/debit card includes contactless yet, afaik, telling people they can just use their credit card when there's no way to swipe or insert is going to lead to confusion and delay at the entrance gates.
Yeah I think if a sign says you can use your contactless credit card or “touch your credit card at the gate” or some language like that, then it should be clear enough.
With validity of credit cards being <5 years you’d think we are at 100% now having no magnetic strip. Perhaps cards issued in some countries do have magnetic strip (but hopefully 100% have contactless too)
"I now just always tell people to just tap in with their phone."
This is all very well but what happens if you have no phone, or it's just been lost, or you left it at home? What happens if there's no credit and you thought there was?
And what happens if you've only cash and or you're a visitor who doesn't know the system and only wants a once-off one-way ticket? And why should one have to top up a card for a once-off journey (how does one recover the residual funds and or how much does the System rake off because residual amounts are too difficult to redeam)?
These systems work for the cognoscenti who know both the system and the workings of their phone but little thought is given to those who don't or when the system breaks down.
Let me give you an instance, I often use a feature/dumb phone and I deliberately do not have a Google account (or any accounts other than the phone number itself) on my smartphone.
Why should I be forced to comply and be spyed on by Google et all just to get a rail ticket which people have done without difficulty for over 150 years?
> What happens if there's no credit and you thought there was
Initial authorization only takes £0.10 and is there to validate your card is active.
The actual charge gets applied 24h later and can overdraw even an account with no arranged overdraft through a transport-only exception with the card networks.
In the end it means you only need 0.10£ to travel for 24 hours, and can keep doing so as long as you fund your account before the initial 24h period (if you fail and it declines it'll retry up to a few days, and there's a way to make it retry online - until it succeeds, that particular card will get refused at the barriers).
The system is used by millions of people per day - and it's these people who pay for it. They don't want to pay for any combination of "what ifs".
As a commuter there I'm sorry, but I'd rather have saved a few quid a month on my ticket than pay for some tourist who can't figure out a credit/debit card despite travelling to one of the world's most expensive cities.
150 years ago you could lose a paper ticket or leave it at home, or it could have been out-of-date when you thought it wasn't, and you'd also be walking.
> 150 years ago you could lose a paper ticket... you'd also be walking.
150 years ago was 1874. Although printed tickets were well and truly established by this point, buying tickets from the conductor was also common. So perhaps you would not be walking home?
The key issue is human engineering and ergonomics which are all too often overlooked by over zealous advocates of new technology.
These issues are not just 'what ifs' but actual problems for a significant percentage of the population, and it's simply discrimination to ignore these people.
For example, a personal instance: I live in Sydney and only last Thursday, I needed to top up the credit on my equivalent of London's
Oyster card (which we copied) and I went to the only machine on Central Station's Grand Concourse only to find that it refused to read three brand new $50 bills (each bill was inserted multiple times and rejected). I then went to the nearby information centre where each of the three persons in the booths had a sign in front saying 'no cash accepted.' I was then told that except for the machine that the Station did not take cash and to top up the card with cash that I had to go to independent shops which were technically outside the Station's precinct.
Frankly, that's a fucking outrageous situation. The Government still issues cash as legal tender, and yet the main railway station in Australia's biggest city won't take cash for a ticket. Keep in mind Central Station is not [yet] run by private enterprise but by the NSW State Government!
BTW, I am no Luddite, I've worked in high tech for years. In fact, I ran the IT Operation for a Government Department [so I'm well acquainted with the ways of bureaucracy], and the rude awakening one has in such a job is that tech that's seemingly straightforward for most people and certainly a no-brainer for technical people—and of course those 'selling' the tech—is actually a problem for a percentage of the population. In fact that percentage can be typically as high as 15%.
If you think this 15% of the population should be relegated to a Soylent Green - like solution then that's your prerogative but it's certainly not mine.
As tech becomes more advanced this dichotomy will become even more pronounced and unless taken into account then social disruption could easily result. (I know this message isn't popular with tech elites—as witnessed by those who down-voted my original comment—but shooting the messenger won't solve anything.)
If you're in tech then you ought to take cognizance of these issues.
Other then that I just used my Oyster card. I don't live in London any more, but I've been back for visits/work and I've had no issues using Google or Apple Pay for contactless tap ins/outs - it's all very seamless. It's really impressive tbh and it's a shame this sort of system isn't rolled out to other cities in the UK, or at least is has patchy support.