Fares and Ticketing

Oyster, ESAF, fares and other ticketing issues

DLR: Penalty Kick

On the DLR, a certain Service Team Leader is causing grief amongst staff. He has developed a nasty habit of taking people to one side and giving them an ear-bashing about penalty fares. Some people might call his behaviour 'bullying'. Especially if he pressurises staff working alone on trains to...

Assistance and ... er ...

The eagle-eyed amongst us spotted some time ago that ticket office windows that used to have illuminated signs above them saying "Assistance and Tickets" now have signs simply saying "Assistance".

Hmmm. It seems that the unions asked why this might be, and management helpfully replied that it was...

Press '1' for Chocolate, '2' for Oyster, ...

Management's latest ruse to replace ticket offices, and therefore ticket office staff, is to sell Oyster cards from vending machines. The machines will be operated by (yet another) private company.

The theory is that the machines will cut queues at the ticket office, but there's a bit of a glitch...

Fraud Survey For Sale?

Creeping privatisation continues to creep into more and more parts of the job. The latest is the Fraud Survey, which LUL wants to sell off. Yet another contractor will mean yet more fragmentation, and yet another company organising for profit rather than for the good of the railway.

Management also...

Bad Data

Today there has been a sudden flurry of '01' codes on ticket gates. It's the code for 'bad data'.

The reason, apparently, is that paper 16/17 photocards are no longer valid, so gates reject the associated Oysters.

It seems that the regulations of the Oyster system change on an almost daily basis -...

Hello? Hello?

Using Oyster - especially with the new punitive charges on people who do not touch in and touch out correctly - relies on a robust system for dealing with service disruption. If someone touches in and makes their way to the platform only to find the service suspended, they have the right to leave...

Remember Remember the 19th of November

... cos there will be fireworks on that day.

Anyone who fails to touch in and out with their Oyster card will find themselves charged the full cash fare for the journey. They will find that out when they try to travel again later in the day only to discover they have not enough money on the Oyster...

ESAF Training?

As ESAF rolls on, MFs are getting a whole five hours training in how the system works. Some people might suggest that is not enough. We will certainly need a longish period of grace to make mistakes without getting into trouble.

A certain Piccadilly line manager reckoned that after the training, an...

ESAF Strife

MFs are getting five hours' training on ESAF. Some might say that's really not enough, so there had better be a decent period of grace for people to make mistakes on the new system without getting into trouble.

But this really takes the biscuit ... a certain manager tried to tell a Cally Road MF to...

Fares Not Fair

Four quid for a Zone 1 single cash fare?! Is Livingstone having a laugh?! He might thing he is encouraging people onto Oyster, but the truth is that he is ripping passengers off. And to think this man made his name over twenty years agao with a policy called Fares Fair!

It would be nice to see the...

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