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

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.