TICKETING London is their Oyster
credit: Redvers
London’s commuter rail services are ex- periencing an Oyster boom.
In the year the cards have been operation- al on National Rail services in the capital, more than 80 million journeys have been made, and the rate now stands at two million pay-as-you-go journeys a week.
credit: Loopzilla
This is up from 600,000 per week in Janu- ary 2010.
TfL said the most popular journeys, with more than 12,000 Oyster pay-as-you-go trips a day, are:
passenger numbers without having to in- crease the number of ticket offices or tick- eting machines.
credit: Amanda Slater
“The throughput of passengers we get with smart cards has really allowed us to dra- matically increase ridership without ne- cessitating capital investment to increase the size of stations.
“A good example of this is Liverpool Street station, where the number of passengers going through the station has expanded greatly over the last ten years but the size of the underground ticket hall has re- mained the same.
“This means we have managed to avoid a capital expansion project that would have cost tens of millions of pounds by vir- tue of speeding up passenger throughput through the gate line, and managed to stay within our overcrowding guidelines, solely because of the use of Oyster. So this has been a huge benefit.
“By introducing a pay-as-you-go product, we have managed to reduce the amount of ticket-selling transactions we have to com- plete for a given level of demand. Again, this has allowed us to greatly expand our
“Another benefit is the reduction in fraud. Ticketless travel has been dramatically re- duced and we have seen a huge fall in for- gery. It is far harder to clone a smart card than it is to forge a paper or magnetic strip ticket.
“A secondary benefit within this area is that because people tend to hold onto their Oyster card, they have inadvertently undermined the touting of one-day travel cards which used to go on but has now completely disappeared.
“This has allowed us to capture far more of the revenue due to us than was previously the case. Every pound of extra revenue we deny fraudsters is a pound less that has to be collected through price increases.”
Oyster has issued around 40 million cards so far and the future is looking bright for smart card technology in all its forms.
Will Judge
FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit
www.tfl.gov.uk/oyster
Waterloo to Clapham Junction, Wimble- don, Putney and Richmond; and Victoria to Clapham Junction and East Croydon.
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said: “Getting Oyster on National Rail has made a radical difference to people living in outer London, many of whom depend on overground rail to get around. I am pleased the train operating companies worked with us to introduce this and it is fantastic that so many people have taken advantage of being able to travel around London, hopping between Tube, bus, river or rail with just a swipe of their trusty Oyster card.”
Shashi Verma, TfL’s director of fares and ticketing, said: “With Oyster you only need one ticket to travel on public transport across the capital and with seven million cards in regular use it is the world’s most successful and popular travel smartcard. It is great to see how quickly and eas- ily commuters on National Rail services have switched to using Oyster pay-as- you-go.”
David Mapp, ATOC commercial director, said: “It was a project which took huge amounts of joint work by train companies, TfL and DfT, so the scale of its success 12 months on is great news for all con- cerned.”
rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 11 | 65
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