Onward from Turnham Green
AUTOMATION GILES PLAYFAIR
Before starting on a journey, so London Trans- port informs its customers, they MUST have a
valid ticket or authority. This is a singularly meaningless imperative. For one thing, there's no legal sanction to be risked through travelling on any railway without a ticket, unless an in- tent to evade payment can be proved, and that is not easily done even when such a malevolent intent actually exists. For another thing, if the men with clippers at the entrance barriers started taking their duties literally, they would very swiftly produce chaos.
In fact, the only authority that many hurried or weary passengers consider they need for starting their journey is the sight of a long, crawling queue at the booking office. Most of them probably pay up in full at the other end.
But there are some whose initial honesty of purpose is inclined to wilt if they find they haven't the right change in their pockets. And there are a few who make a habit of cheating on principle, so to speak. All in all, fare- dodging still amounts to an estimated half- million pounds a year, despite the sharply in- creased penalties for this offence that have been threatened since 1964.
This is a bigger loss of revenue than London Transport is prepared to tolerate, especially now that the days are gone—very likely beyond recall—when a handsome profit on its bus services more than offset the total deficit on its railways. Hence it has turned to modern technology for a solution. If the Russians and Americans can confidently expect a start to the exploration of the moon within the next decade, we can at least be sure of possessing, in our ancient capital, the world's most advanced system of automated fare collection.
The plan calls for every ticket issued to be a magnetically coded one, giving information about time of purchase, place of purchase and so on. Gates at both inward and outward station barriers will be equipped to read these tickets, and to open only when satisfied of their validity. For good measure, the robots will also keep a photographic record of the number of passengers who lawfully pass through them. To ease the additional pressure on the booking offices, which would otherwise result from this development, there are to be many more and better automatic ticket machines: single-fare machines capable of giving the appropriate change for a coin and huge multi-fare machines able to change notes as well as coins (which one hopes is not to anticipate a time when they will need to swallow notes whole). • An embryo of this grand design has been, on view now for nearly two years at Turnham Green and a few other stations on the far west of the District Line. It seemed to me (as I wrote at the time) that the Turnham Green passengers—I among them—had been unjustly singled out for punishment, when we arrived one morning at our small, old-world, but pretty busy station, to find ingress to the platforms im- possible without first queueing up for a ticket. Only one robot had been placed at the entrance barrier, but since a human guard was also on duty to make sure that nobody snubbed or ill- treated it, it proved all-powerful.
Soon after I made my complaints public, an automatic ticket machine was iistalled. But this has proved rather an empty gesture of good intentions, since it responds not to fourpence or even sixpence, but only to Is 9d. There was also what appeared to be a fleeting promise of piped music during rush hour. But this idea for soothing the nerves of passengers with music while we waited (if that is what it was) swiftly expired.
Meanwhile, London Transport's determina- tion to automate fare collection remains less than impaired, and, in so far as this can be truthfully said of anything that happens in modern Britain, plans are being pushed vigorously ahead. In July of last year, a second robot appeared at Turnham Green to guard the exit barrier, and at the same time a window at the booking office, which had previously been permanently and puzzlingly closed, was opened for the collection of excess fares. Already London Transport is delighted that booking office receipts at Turnham Green have risen during peak hours by about 10 per cent. But an end to fare-dodging is not all it is looking forward to. It hopes to make an even bigger saving through being able to dispense in the end with all the human ticket collectors, who could be usefully redeployed. In a word, it has no doubt that the high capital cost of its plan— some £600,000 has already been spent—will be justified by the additional revenue.
Yet I still can't help wondering whether automated fare collection won't be bound to make the business of getting into, on to and out of the underground an even slower and more tortuous process than it is already. It is believed that each robot will be capable of dealing with thirty-five passengers a minute (the present rate at Turnham Green is twenty- five a minute). Even allowing for inevitable delays caused by people who drop their tickets or insert them upside-down or what have you, there might be nothing much to fear, if I could feel confident that there will be a sufficient number of robots at the barriers in good working order and a sufficient number of automatic ticket machines in the same state.
But that seems a pretty big if, when one recalls how often the existing automatic ticket machines are found to be 'not in use.' I doubt, moreover, whether all but a very few stations are spacious enough to make automatic fare collection possible without pain. Perhaps—and this is a possibility London Transport is itself well aware of—the whole system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt.
Or, alternatively, left alone. London Trans- port seems obsessed with the problem of how to pay its way, which is understandable since that is what it is required to do; and if it thinks it has found the only possible solution in automatic fare collection, then that is some- thing it cannot be blamed for foisting on its customers, regardless of the possible strain on their patience. But there remains, I should have thought, a larger question. In a country which is continually being told to pull up its socks, get moving, produce more, etc., is it sensible to worry about making a public trans- port service, any public transport service, pay, if this can only be achieved at the cost of slowing up the physical movement and adding to the nervous fatigue of people upon whom production depends?
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