Get rid of the ticket barriers

Why being tough on fare dodging might mean removing the gates

There has recently been a lot of online discourse about deliberate fare-dodging on the Tube. The discourse follows a real problem: disreputable characters have discovered that you can fairly easily push your way through the big barriers intended for people with disabilities or luggage. It’s common enough that every regular Tube passenger has at some point witnessed it. It exemplifies something we have all noticed: London has become a visibly worse city in the past ten years. I have zero tolerance towards it.

It might therefore come as a surprise that I think we should get rid of the ticket barriers.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have to pay to get the train. Instead, we should use the same system as in German-speaking countries, where there are no fare barriers: you just buy a ticket, and get on the train. Payment is enforced by the fact that you get your ticket inspected every so often. The proportion of journeys subject to ticket checks should be small enough that passengers aren’t constantly hassled, but sufficiently large that it acts as a real deterrent to passengers. This system is known as proof-of-payment, or POP.

There is a very good reason we should switch to this system, and that is construction costs. New tunnelling lines are outstandingly expensive: in constant dollars, the Northern Line Extension cost $551 mn/km, twice as much as Copenhagen’s City Circle Line – a comparable project except that it had to weave its way through other infrastructure in the centre, while the NLE was built to serve the brownfield developments around Battersea Power Station.

Stations are a big driver of construction costs: Whitechapel station on the Elizabeth Line alone cost £659 mn, while the tunnels cost about £100 mn per kilometre. Part of the reason stations are expensive is they have to be massive, with wide platforms and lots of circulating space as anybody who has experienced the Elizabeth Line at rush hour knows.

But not every part of the station has to be massive. Above ground, thanks to the fare gates every station needs a ticket hall that is big enough – and crucially wide enough – to contain enough ticket barriers to handle all the passengers.

This is the ticket hall at Battersea Power Station Station [sic] on the NLE. The crowd fans out to get through the barriers, and then fans back together to go down to the platforms. The only reason the ticket hall needs to be so wide is thanks to all the ticket barriers.

Tellingly, this image is very wide. Image from SAS Group.

This is by no means the only driver of construction costs, nor the most important. But on the margin, we would be able to build smaller and cheaper stations if we used POP. In many countries, the typical suburban metro station is accessed by a flight of stairs plus a lift in the middle of the pavement, which takes passengers directly down to platform level if the station is built cut-and-cover. If the station is deeper, or has multiple entrances, then the stairs go to a small mezzanine level, where there is another set of stairs down to the platforms. (Escalators are only used in city-centre stations.)

The main entrance to Viktoria-Luise-Platz in Berlin. Image from Bahnbilder. There is another entrance down the street (visible in the background) which is just a lift in the middle of the street.

The platform. The entrance steps can be seen as the chinks of light at the far end of the platform. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

It is obviously cheaper to build stations if you don’t need big mezzanine levels or ticket halls to contain all the barriers. That in turn means you are freer to spend money on things that are actually useful for passengers, like additional entrances.

The ticket checks would (at least in London) unfortunately need to be carried out in the company of a British Transport Police officer. The risk of anti-social behaviour is too high. That would, at least, mean that there was somebody at hand to arrest miscreants, and the occasional sight of a police officer at the entrance to a Tube station with a handcuffed fare dodger might also usefully act as a deterrent.

In London, moving to POP would also require big changes to the way fares are calculated. On TfL, Oyster and contactless work on a pay-as-you-go basis, which doesn’t really work with POP, as people would have to buy a separate ticket for every journey. In German-speaking countries, regular commuters have a monthly or annual season ticket, with a simple zonal fare system coordinated by a Verkehrsverbund, or transport association.

The obvious objection to POP is that fare dodging would increase. But I’m not sure that this is the case. In fact, I can see a world in which the rate of fare-dodging would go down with POP.

Think about it this way. The reason ordinary people care about fare dodging is that while the vast majority of us pay our fares like we are supposed to, a minority are able to get away with not paying. We play by the rules; they break them with impunity. It is a repudiation of the social contract.

Conversely, TfL’s incentive is only to care about fare dodging to the extent that it affects their bottom line compared with the costs of clamping down. TfL believe (p15) that there is currently a fare evasion rate of 4.7%, and that with ‘a bold, target-driven and agile approach to tackling fare evasion’ (whatever that means) they will get it down to under 1.5%. Presumably reducing the rate any further would be too expensive. In any event I doubt this goal will actually be achieved – at some point between 4.7% and 1.5%, spending more resources on tackling fare dodging will not be worth it.

This isn’t to say TfL are anti-social contract. I am sure that they would like the rate of fare dodging to be 0%. But reducing it costs money, and there comes a point (say, 3%, to split the difference between the alleged current level and TfL’s ambitious target) where money could be better spent elsewhere.

POP better aligns incentives between the public and TfL. At the moment it is in TfL’s interests to stop enforcing payment when fare dodging is below a certain level. That is not the case with POP, because the entire system is built on everybody having their tickets checked every so often. There is no level of fare dodging at which ticket inspections can be effectively halted. Occasional ticket checks are a visible sign that the social contract is being upheld by the authorities, and act as a panopticon (panPOPticon?) that may well reduce fare dodging more than barriers ever could.