Tube Strikes And Cashless Buses
London for the next two days will suffer a Tube strike, about the closing of ticket offices and putting more staff in station lobbies and on platforms. New technology means that very few people need the ticket offices and the space could be better used for other purposes like retail.
Yesterday, London buses announced that they would no longer accept cash on buses from the summer. I would have thought that the Unions would have objected to this, as surely there must be job losses in those handling the cash. Or are the unions concerned with buses, in favour of a better service for all Londoners, whereas those on the Tube, are just out to do a King Canute and turn back the tide of new technology.
I suspect, every rail company in the UK, can’t wait for the day when Bob Crow retires!
London Buses To Go Cashless
It’s been announced that from this summer, London buses will go cashless.
Since Transport for London announced their consultation in August last year, there has been little discussion anywhere on the proposal in the media. Which makes me think, that most users of London buses are not bothered at all.
I’m very much in favour, as often my bus is delayed as groups of young people are using cash. Strangely, I’ve never seen anyone my side of forty, buying a ticket recently. They all seem to use either Oyster or a Freedom Pass. Could it be that most younger people only use buses as a last resort and many actually haven’t, as they always use their cars or have been driven around by their family?
London Shows Contactless Cards Work On Buses
This article on Finextra, shows that what the Dismal Jimmies predicted when you could use your contactless cards for bus travel didn’t happen. Here’s the two paragraphs.
Transport for London is celebrating a successful one-year anniversary of the use of contactless payments cards on the capital’s buses, as it prepares to extend the technology to the entire transit network in 2014.
Since it was launched on Thursday 13 December 2012 when 2,061 customers made 2,586 journeys, more than 6.5 million journeys have now been made using an American Express, MasterCard or Visa Europe contactless payment card.
So now we have another good thing, that the banks have done for us in addition to the cash machine.
I hope, I’m young enough to be able to use my contactkess bank card on public transport all over the world. It would certainly have helped in Bilbao and a lot of other places I’ve visited this year.
Why London’s Bus Ticketing Is Right
To use London’s buses, you need either to have an Oyster Card, a bank or credit card you can wave at the reader, or cash. If you’re lucky like me and have survived to a certain age, you can have a Freedom Pass, if you live in the city.
Today, this flexibility was well illustrated.
I had lunch with a friend, who had to get to Euston afterwards, to get home to Liverpool. The easiest way was to take a bus and a 390 arrived to do the honours. I used my Freedom Pass and I lent her my Oyster Card, that I always carry for visitors or for my own use on the cable-car and river buses.
When we had sat down, I realised she could also have used her contactless credit card. It didn’t occur to me at the time, as my cards don’t have the feature. She did say though, that she would use the buses in London with her’s in future.
It just goes to show how I think that London is going the right way and I think they’ll come a time, when a contactless bank or credit card is the standard method of buying a bus, tram, metro or train ticket all over the world. Her city of Liverpool is already planning to introduce the system on trains.
We are going to see a revolution in ticketing in the next few years and those places that don’t go with the flow will find themselves in the slow lane for visitors and tourists.
Transport for London Consults On Cashless Buses
I saw this poster at Euston yesterday.
Transport for London Consults On Cashless Buses
I have added my four pennyworth and can honestly say, it was a well-written survey. You can comment here.
London Buses May Go Cashless
According to reports like this one on the BBC, it looks like London buses may go cashless.
There have been a few comments that the usual suspects are against this, as it may hurt the poor and the vulnerable, but I don’t think it will create too many problems after the first few months, especially if publicity and the technology was cranked up a bit.
I do remember though, a conversation on a Manchester bus, with an off-duty driver and union representative. He felt that their single-door buses where the low-life gathered around the driver and tried to steal his money were very inferior to two-door buses. he would have loved a cashless system.
I’ve just done a small calculation. There are six million riders on each weekday on London’s buses and working on a figure for today that one per cent of riders buy a ticket with cash, that means that 60,000 riders a day buy paper tickets. as there are 250 weekdays in a year, that means there are fifteen million tickets sold each year.
The cost of collecting the cash is given as £24 million a year, so it would almost appear that some of those without tickets could be issued with a free get-you-home ticket. Transport for London are saying they might bring in the Hong Kong system, where an expired card is good for one journey.
I do think though that if the decision was made to go cashless, as the no-cash day approached most people would do something about getting a ticket like Oyster.
i do suspect though that there will be a few objectors, who would not countenance any ticket like Oyster, that enabled them to be tracked,
The Anonymous Widower 