> ...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.
> ...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?