Ticketing and Concessionary Travel on Public Transport - United ...

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Ev 30 Transport Committee: Evidence 5 December 2007 Mr Roy Wicks, Mr Neil Scales, Mr David Cook, Mr Adrian Jones <strong>and</strong> Mr Greg Yates we implemented the arbitrator’s findings. One operator is still pursuing us for 2007/8. Q248 Chairman: You made that very clear to the Department? Mr Wicks: Yes. Q249 Chairman: Is there any actual evidence of metropolitan councils not passing concessionary travel money to PTEs? Mr Wicks: I think certainly all the evidence we have is that all the money the Government is putting into concessionary fares is being passed through. Certainly with my own authority it is passed through as a transparent amount. Witnesses: Mr Shashi Verma, Director of Fares & <strong>Ticketing</strong>, <strong>and</strong> Mr Steve Burton, Deputy Director of Transport Policing & Enforcement, Transport for London, gave evidence. Q250 Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen. Would you be kind enough to identify yourselves for the record? Mr Verma: I am Shashi Verma. I am Director of Fares & <strong>Ticketing</strong> for Transport for London. Mr Burton: I am Steve Burton, Deputy Director of Transport Policing & Enforcement for TfL. Q251 Chairman: Thank you. Have you got anything you wanted to say to us? You have submitted written evidence. Mr Verma: Just that I am not entitled to be called a doctor. I think you have got to finish your PhD to do that, <strong>and</strong> I did not finish mine. Q252 Chairman: It might be a bit embarrassing if somebody has a coronary! If you were in Germany you would automatically be a doctor. How reliable is the Oyster card system? Mr Verma: Very. We process ten million transactions a day. Not one of them goes wrong. It is a very reliable system. The transactions are always secure <strong>and</strong> reliable. The cards themselves have a failure rate that is incredibly small. We have 0.03% of cards failing in any given month, which is a record that is even better than the banking industry has right now. Q253 Chairman: If a customer thinks they have done the right thing <strong>and</strong> “touched in <strong>and</strong> out” correctly with their card but finds they have been charged wrongly, can they get compensation? Mr Verma: Yes. We have a process of correcting customers’ journeys where they think they have done the right thing but they may not have done the right thing, or something may have happened with the system. They can get a refund from any ticket oYce on the London Underground or by phoning the help line. Where there has been a major incident, such as we have had with floods in July or the snow incident in February when people were unable to “touch in <strong>and</strong> out” because of excess crowding at stations, we have processed a direct refund to all customers of our own accord. Mr Yates: Just one other unintended thing, or possibly intended, is that there appears to have been a general strengthening to the bus network in our shire county since this came to pass. Obviously 60% more passengers are doing it good, but the reimbursement may be helping the buses more than it was perhaps intended to do. But it has got a positive eVect in the sense that the county council pays for the bus support, so on the one h<strong>and</strong> it is benefiting whilst the cost to the district councils are rising <strong>and</strong> maybe not adequately met. So that is another argument for balancing the whole bus financing equation under one roof, possibly, to bring it all together. Chairman: I think that has all been extraordinarily helpful, gentlemen. Thank you very much indeed. Q254 Mrs Ellman: London has got the most advanced smartcard scheme. Do you think you have a duty to cooperate with other operators introducing other smartcards? Mr Verma: Yes, <strong>and</strong> we do. We do cooperate with a number of people both in the UK <strong>and</strong> outside <strong>and</strong> we are cooperating with the Department for Transport on the introduction of ITSO in London. Q255 Chairman: Are there any problems with ITSO as far as you are concerned? Mr Verma: I think there is a number of issues with ITSO. I would not necessarily call them problems, but there is a number of issues with ITSO which need to be thought through <strong>and</strong> thought through quite carefully. We have the advantage of saying this with the experience of running a very large smartcard scheme, indeed the largest smartcard scheme in the world right now. Smartcard ticketing is inherently very, very diVerent from paper ticketing. It is an invisible medium where people are unable to see the content of what lies inside their smartcards <strong>and</strong> it raises its own customer service challenge. The biggest customer service challenge around smartcards is that the customer needs to have absolute confidence that they will always be charged the right fare <strong>and</strong> that money is not going to disappear from their cards. One way of dealing with that is to deal with the security of the system, which is very important, of course, but irrespective of how secure the system is there are always customer queries, customer complaints which come up <strong>and</strong> there has to be a very clear <strong>and</strong> clearly articulated means of addressing those customer queries. The concern we have with ITSO is that the customer service model behind ITSO is not articulated at this present moment. Q256 Chairman: Simply because it is older technology than the one you are using, or because the remit is diVerent? What is the basic diVerence? Mr Verma: There is a lot of work which has been done in coming up with the ITSO st<strong>and</strong>ard <strong>and</strong> the specification for ITSO, which is a technical st<strong>and</strong>ard
about how the data on the smartcard itself is going to be configured, which is very important in <strong>and</strong> of itself. There is an ambition to see the ITSO smartcard be interoperable, but the question we have in our minds is, if you take the example of a customer who has got an ITSO smartcard, maybe from a library in one of the cities somewhere in the UK, <strong>and</strong> who then goes <strong>and</strong> buys a ticket from a ticket retailer <strong>and</strong> takes the national rail train down to London <strong>and</strong> then arrives at our gate <strong>and</strong> the ticket does not work, what is that customer supposed to do? With Oyster it is very clear. We deal with the customer queries. Irrespective of where the customer came from, the query goes back to Transport for London. In that model is it the issuer of the card or the seller of the ticket, who could be anyone, or the person who brought that person down to London, which could be GNER or Virgin, or us? Who is going to deal with that? These are questions which are actually quite important when you start thinking about the way we deal with smartcards because people are not able to see what ticket they have. Q257 Mrs Ellman: What stage are you at in trying to deal with that? Are there any discussions going on? Mr Verma: There is a number of discussions going on right now about making the Transport for London network capable of accepting ITSO smartcards in a technical sense, but the Department for Transport <strong>and</strong> the ITSO organisation have left commercial arrangements between operators to the operators themselves. We have not been approached by any operator who wants to run an ITSO smartcard-based scheme in London yet. Q258 Chairman: Forgive me, but that is a slightly disingenuous reply, Mr Verma. Nobody is actually going to come to you <strong>and</strong> say, “We are running one system <strong>and</strong> we are making a reasonable profit on it <strong>and</strong> we would like actually to move to another one,” unless you say to them, “The basic advantage will be X, Y, Z,” <strong>and</strong> presumably that is not what you have done? Mr Verma: What we have been able to tell people is the advantage of using a smartcard that we have realised. Q259 Chairman: That does not surprise me altogether. I think that is probably quite an eYcient thing to do, “Look, I do mine better than him. Mr Verma: Well, it is not a question of me doing mine better than him. There is a very specific rationale for introducing Oyster in London, leaving aside the technology. The challenge we faced ten years ago was a three point challenge. The number of tickets being sold in the system was very, very large. We have, through the introduction of Oyster <strong>and</strong> through the introduction of Oyster pay as you go particularly we have cut down the number of tickets being sold in our system by 60%. Where we used to sell 1.8 million tickets per day we are selling 800,000 tickets per day right now. So a million times a day someone is not walking up to a ticket machine to buy a ticket, which is a huge advantage both to us as an operator <strong>and</strong> to customers. As an operator, 5 December 2007 Mr Shashi Verma <strong>and</strong> Mr Steve Burton Transport Committee: Evidence Ev 31 that is a step we would rather not cater to. We do not want to build ticket machines if people do not need to buy the tickets. The second very important factor in the introduction of Oyster was gate throughput, throughput through the gate, throughput through the bus network, <strong>and</strong> this is where very fast read speeds becomes very important. There are 25 stations on the Underground network where in the morning, every weekday morning between 8.00 <strong>and</strong> 9.00 we put more than 25 people per minute through the gate line, so just over two seconds through the gate line. This is not just the time it takes to read the Oyster card, this is the time it takes for a customer to present themselves at the gate, tap the Oyster card, walk through the gate <strong>and</strong> clear the gate for the next customer to go through. If that transaction time starts to decline, so if you start to put fewer than 25 people through the gate line, that will mean that we need to increase the size of our gate lines, put more gates through, <strong>and</strong> with the kind of Victorian network we have got in many instances that is a very expensive proposition, often costing tens of millions of pounds, because there is not the space to put more gates even if we wanted to. Those are both very important things. The third factor was that the very limited logic that was available on paper tickets meant there was a number of ways in which people were able to travel through the system at a fare which was lower than the fare they should have paid. An example of this would be if you bought a zone 6 only paper ticket from Heathrow a few years ago you could travel all the way to Upminster in East London, which is also a zone 6 station. The fare should have been a zone 1 to zone 6 fare. You would have paid only a zone 6 fare. You cannot do that any more with Oyster <strong>and</strong> as a result of the improvement <strong>and</strong> logic of that kind the lost revenue through—I would not necessarily call it fraud because it is not intentional as fraud, but the lost revenue from the system has declined quite markedly, so we are saving a large amount of money on that count as well. Those are the benefits we have realised. Many of those benefits may be replicable in other parts of the country as well. Some may not, but some others may be. Chairman: I think you have started some hares running there! Q260 Clive EVord: I have always been obviously labouring under the misunderst<strong>and</strong>ing that the problem with our Victorian London Underground was that there were too many people down there, getting down there too fast, not that we could not get them down there quick enough. I am frequently coming through Victoria Station, where I am forced to st<strong>and</strong> on the concourse because you cannot get any more people down on the trackside. Mr Verma: Victoria has a very special <strong>and</strong> very specific problem in that the station was built with one entrance when it should have been built with two. That is something we are correcting at very large expense over the next few years. As a result of that there is a lot of crowding on the southern end.
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House of Commons Transport Committe
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Contents Report Page 1 Introduction
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4 5. Smartcards offer a range of ne
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6 Integrated bus ticketing 10. Thro
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8 Long distance coach services are
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10 strategy, including those in the
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12 long-distance rail passengers ma
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14 services have not been put in pl
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16 Oyster on rail services in Londo
Page 19 and 20: 18 4 Revenue protection and
Page 21 and 22: 20 Staff safety 61. Transport staff
Page 23 and 24: 22 66. An integrated ticketing syst
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Page 27 and 28: 26 concession authorities that attr
Page 29 and 30: 28 operators and a
Page 31 and 32: 30 List of recommendations Integrat
Page 33 and 34: 32 Concessionary t
Page 35 and 36: 34 Formal Minutes Clive Efford Mrs
Page 37 and 38: 36 List of written evidence 1 Dr Ro
Page 39 and 40: 38 List of Reports from the Committ
Page 41 and 42: Oral evidence Taken before the Tran
Page 43 and 44: 14 November 2007 Mr Chris Austin, M
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Page 57 and 58: 14 November 2007 Mr Keith Halstead
Page 59 and 60: definition of severe disability <st
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Page 73 and 74: things around it. We have got over
Page 75 and 76: which comes out of the usage of the
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Is the legal framework within which
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The Use of Smartcard Technologies I
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Executive Summary Memorand<
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Integration Nationally Transport Co
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— Ensure the confidentiality of d
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7. What appeal mechanisms exist for
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Concessionary Fare
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Introduction Memorand</stro
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Concessionary Fare
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Confusion over what local authoriti
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Question 68 Timings of Oyster <stro
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