tfl fare evasion settle out of court
As I pointed out in a recent post, Melun which is on the other side of the river Seine to Fontainebleu about 45km from central Paris, has 50,000 residents at density 5,000/km2. Maybe on ticket inspections on the Metro (not really, they seem to adopt the policy of everyone in a carriage or exiting the platform, will be checked). These costs should therefore be understood as hidden taxes: they fall disproportionately on commuters and on the public purse, and benefit employers. However, what Ive encountered more resistance about is the idea that people should just be able to walk onto a bus or train. I read the Vox article and I have to say, I told you so! and then got arrested and taken to court when they refused to pay the outrageous fines. Except of course it only delays the inevitable building of proper transit, which delay causes an entirely different level of cost escalation, not to mention opportunity cost. Is it a trip possible by biking or walking? Of course the Oyster card tech (copied from Hong Kongs Octopus) could have fed the Brits propensity to burden their fare systems with all kinds of conditional time and zoning regulations that would have allowed them to painlessly pump up the cost to the customer. Since racial identification is supposed to not occur in official stats. You specifically dont want discounts on tolls, though the point of tolling is to discourage car traffic, e.g. TRANSPORT FOR LONDON PROSECUTIONS I can only speak of Colognes system (and my bus and tram service to uni and the station) but Colognes busses and trams even have ticket machines inside. In the context of most US metros, I think looking at transit fares in isolation is a mistake. TFL fare evasion out In Paris, various classes of low-income riders, such as the unemployed, benefit from a solidarity fare discount of 50-75%. There are at least a couple in SF (24th and 16th and Mission) that do this. But no other American city has that excuse. (We know this is not true as evidenced byas one exampleyour upcoming conf.) See In re 3M Bair Hugger Litigation, 924 N.W.2d 16, 24 (Minn. App. Hmmm, Grenfell maybe not (when they renovated the building they actually removed one of the two stairwells ). Then the S-Bahn probably gets a lot of subsidies at least outside of the trunk areas. It is seemingly impossible to get comprehensive timetables (and costs) for all trains plying a certain route. Excellent services. FA November 2020, Wonderful experience. Pendeltg is the proper S-Bahn / RER after all and that started in 1968. Probably best to seek actual legal advice from a solicitor than take advice from an Internet forum where your criminal record is at stake. Compared to other major European countries, commuting costs take up a considerably larger amount of workers pay (Table 1). Whats a little food poisoning now and then? That maybe the US its not in the UK. And London. I agree with the first letter writer. @Phake Nick Sorry that narrative is wrong, the pro-car consensus was if anything more dominant 1950-1987, highways and railways were actually paired together e.g. BSB was my first choice when I faced the likelihood of prosecution after I failed to show a valid bus ticket when travelling in Central London. TFL Fare evasion prosecution | RailUK Forums. UK.ManchesterLiverpool2578% I imagine the Ring here breaks even too and the subsidies go to the branches in the suburbs. Likewise, even though the Helsinki Metro is profitable, it works in conjunction with buses, trams, and commuter trains that are not, its just that theres an imputation of revenues by mode/operator offered in Helsinki and (sort of) Berlin but not in Paris. requires time or athletics) to do? Paris if flat fare so it doesnt matter and they can have more, unattended, exits far from the attended area. The thing is they are impenetrable by fare-dodgers and so they dont even try (the interlocking-bars full-height type) and so these exits can be unmanned without problems, and they need almost zero maintenance. For more precise recording, there are teams of inspectors checking every ticket, and in the case of pass holders they ask from where to where the trip goes. I have seen a claim of Ile de France urbanised zone as 3,640/km2. So if the breakeven point is exactly 45, people who only use transit for commuting are on the knifes edge and in most cases wont get a monthly. New York does poorly on the metric of encouraging monthlies. No one is questioning that it could be done by technology. Whats more, the fare inspection should be a low-key affair. Your argument against which kind of trips that are induced by marginal price costs of 0, just makes no sense. Partly for simplicity but also for social-justice: zoning can make it very expensive the further out you live and yet these are the very people the city most wants to give up their car habits! German railways has worked over the past decade or longer? This opinion will be unpublished and Whereas today the program is a net revenue generator if it halves subway fare evasion, a level that already seems strained, within ten years, assuming normal fare escalation, it will need to cut fare evasion by about 90%, which is a complete fantasy. In Seattle, we have an unusual situation. Wow, I had no idea a Japanese city could have so much car dependent sprawl! The Special Settlement Conference In the US, trip chaining by car is relatively painless because of land use, highways, and ubiquitous parking. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/18/free-public-transportation/#comment-61991. The whole situation was resolved very quickly in just over a week and much to my relief I received a warning for forgetting to tap in, rather than a prosecution and a criminal record. Its only wasteful if people are taking unnecessary rush hour trips, but even with the pricing of Zurich or the outer fare zones in Stockholm, the monthly pass is mostly subsidizing off-peak trips, when theres spare capacity. Except for the occasional hospitalization or death. All of the agencies have counts, they just chose the laziest way to enforce things, then went ahead and enforced it with vigor. The cap on permits and the insurance/rent expenses of operating them in a subway station are indeed something to note. Its response last week to the cancellation of so many Southern trains was to issue a new timetable, removing one in six of its trains. This logic does not work the same way for people living in the retail-rich neighborhoods of New York, London, Paris, etc, where people are within walking distance of many of their destinations. But Q4 is why you need the PERCEPTION of enforcement., Now I say perception here because THATS WHAT MATTERS. And also that Caltrain may realize based on the new data whether they should be charging participating employers more or less, etc. Anyway, the reason London doesnt have these is because of their nitpicking fare system: they need you to swipe out to calculate the fare. For the other 5%, you would just put in the starting and ending destination in a machine, and the machine would tell you the price. I dont think Aaron was saying he agreed with this position. With regard to other countries in the Anglosphere, I think Singapore and London actually do have monthlies: Singapore has the Adult Monthly Travel Card allowing unlimited use of bus and train services for a month islandwide, for $120. its the poor who suffer from more from dirty streets and parks. Japan has a norm of subsidized commuting costs (mostly employer subsidized, but the amount of government subsidy increases as income increases since it comes as a tax benefit), and while its cool that people can and do commute via Shinkansen from exurbs over 100km from the city center, I dont think that is behavior the government should promote. CV (July 2017), I decided to use my mothers Freedom Pass just tosave money which was a terrible mistake. Heres a whinge about train costs in the UK, from the weekend travel letters section (just so Alon doesnt think Im making this stuff up). That is what happens in the UK where taxes are high and user-charges are high (and as it happens with a system run on econocratic lines, the service is poorer; a trifecta merde sandwich). https://www.traveller.com.au/traveller-letters-campari-spritz-is-far-superior-to-aperol-spritz-h1jm5q Thanks, BSB Solicitors. a healthy economy too. The Swiss at least do zonal fares with monthly passes. It cancels more trains than all the other rail firms in Britain put together. 1) BART has distance-based fares. Affordable transit, along with affordable housing, is just one thing in not only creating an equitable society, but as economists now realise (doh!) Yeah, better than they used to be, but still expensive and some conditional travel. Sounds miserlyalmost Britishcompared to Paris. Stores dont have gates. Using another persons ticket (Student Oyster Card, Freedom Pass or another type of discounted travel card), Passing through the ticket barriers without paying, Travelling further than your ticket allows you to, Travelling in a first-class carriage, when only purchasing a standard ticket. Most months have a holiday in them, and there may also be a sick or vacation day thrown in. I didnt understand this the first time I read it. I dont see the benefit of making these trips really cheap for monthly pass users, while very expensive for everyone else. NYCs subway, though a lot less user-friendly, at least has the virtue of fare simplicity. Hope that isnt a dark omen. BTW, where did you get that data? Please see our reviews at the bottom of this page and contact our office on 020 7837 3456 for further details and to make an appointment. And on a separate point, building rail-based public transit to outer-suburban areas is essential in promoting densification in those areas, around the transit station, ie. (Both also have the worst inequality amongst the developed world so they need to cater to the low-SES workers.) Nor is making it easier to follow the law going to encourage more crime to the contrary. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/southern-rail-failure-crush-unions You are thinking of financial performance rather than transit performance. It is clear that in contexts such as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, or Taipei, that really are true transit cities, public acceptance for an efficient pricing structure is pretty high (though peak-fare hikes are less common). More people either work from home one or two days a week or are often hopping between client sites or their own company locations throughout the week and which might not even be in the same city. I am way out of date. Slightly curiously Stockholm has faregates (as you certainly know). Oh, and the new companies will of course order the cheapest rolling stock they can find which will mean Chinese, which in turn will reduce the profitability and scale etc of Alstom and Siemens (which arent allowed to merge to effectively compete against the likes of even more massively state-subsidised China rail companies). And the London lessons are very applicable to NY. The UK has one of the most backward commuting settlements in Europe in this regard. It is the worst performing train operator of the lot. The most urbanised zone is Paris + Petite Couronne: 6,695,233 (2011) on 761km2 = 8,786/km2. ts not about maximising milk, its about minimising potential moo., And thats ALSO why youll see TfL/National Rail come down HEAVILY in the courts on anyone with real money who evades (e.g. Fare evasion rate on Hong Kongs open, non-gated, LRT system in year 2002-2005 was said to be only 0.4%, but there doesnt seems to be any more updated data. We are seeing violence directed at transit systems around the world which weve discussed here recently (link below). I think its also right thing to talk about the sum of the three: There isnt really much they can do except hand down fines. And of course the marginal cost to the operator of these discretionary trips is close to zero, especially as they are almost wholly out of peak periods. I would wholly recommend BSB Solicitors for anyone looking for help with fare evasion cases. As in Paris-RER this is best done with attractive monthly cards, so even people who have to use cars at least some of the time are tempted to still have a monthly card and use it for all journeys where possible. Im not sure how much they were promoting free transit (I only browsed it) but their predominant conclusion about UK policy on fares and costs was solid. In cases where longer term avoidance of fares in suspected, for example using someone elses reduced fare Oyster Card over a period of time, Transport for London (TFL) may want to interview you under caution. What? Its about whether its fair to impose essentially middle-class bourgeois standards of behavior on public transit systems. Prosecutions act as a deterrent, in theory discouraging others from evading their fares. I understand why a transfer station should look like this, but Singapore has these enormous complexes with mezzanines even at non-transfer stations. (LogOut/ Exactly. In talking to Americans about fare evasion, I have found that they are generally receptive to the idea of minimizing revenue loss net of collection costs. The German-speaking world, as irrational as Britain and France about urban crime rates that are far lower than they were a generation ago, still treats the train and bus rider as a law-abiding customer unless proven otherwise. If fares generally bring in X amount of revenue, then why would increasing tax revenue by X be bad. Verified Hi Thank you for your question. in Paris the faregates made crowd control worse in the World Cup victory celebrations. [You double-posted; I deleted the shorter version.]. Their policy may be concrete before electronics/operations, but much of the city isnt even close to any concrete. This situation requires not only a shift in the thinking concerning the ownership of commuting infrastructure, but also a radical restructuring of its funding model. Fare Evasion Solicitors No one will jump a fare gate 10 feet in front of uniformed police officer. I am on record on your blog as not supporting free transit, but I certainly believe in reasonable fares which inevitably means some subsidy, though it is true that it should not be called that, rather a sharing of costs among all those who benefit from transit. Having said that, I have dark forebodings about the EU open access directive coming into force on all railways. classic TOD. Also its fare gates are an awful design to boot. Then theres this (below) which is sooo London (and again there could be some HK-inspired rebellion; will this system have face-recognition? Theres a moralistic discourse in the United States about fare evasion on public transport that makes it about every issue other than public transport or fares. Software because of Chile, but it goes back further than that) isnt great. They will then consider whether to initiate a prosecution. Evidently it did non-German things like building a full metro in a then-small city rather than a Stadtbahn and having Lokalbanan terminate in outlying areas with a T-bana transfer rather than trying to through-run them as S-Bahns. Up to 20 million workers would see increases in real incomes. tfl fare evasion settle out of court Find out about prosecutions, court proceedings and how to get help with your case. Germany..Eberswalde.Berlin.1204%. The MTA has also mentioned a higher figure, $300 million; I do not know if the higher figure includes just urban transit or also commuter rail, where conductors routinely miss inspections, giving people free rides. One might say that of course they would say that. Throughout the process there was great communication between us and a week or so later, he informed me I was able to settle out of court with no criminal conviction., I cannot stress enough how good BSB Solicitors have been. And incidentally I totally reject your repeated assertion that low fares, or flat fares, to the outer zones of big cities, encourages sprawl, because it does the opposite (it will encourage TOD around the stations) and is much more likely to entice them out of their cars. As far as I understand, in Japan it is common (maybe even law) that the employer pays for the passes of their employees. Prosecutions - Transport for London WebOlliers Solicitors: Criminal Defence Law Firm Manchester & London It is you who is artificially creating a them versus us war, which is reminiscent of London where there is definitely a class that would never use the Underground. Plan a journey and favourite it for quick access in the future, Choose postcodes, stations and places for quick journey planning, Find out more about the Single Justice Procedure and how to submit your plea, London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority. Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed my travels in both countries, I was astounded by the cost of regional trains and bus and tube transport in the UK. It seems a bit of a wasted effort otherwise, eh?, Oh, should of added, that this is why when youre designing your roaming checks youre really looking for how you can MAXIMISE the number of people that saw that check happen. And of course it is not the least ethnically discriminatory . Andy McDonald, the [Labour] partys shadow transport secretary, said: Privatisation has created one of the most complex, exploitative and expensive ticketing systems in the world. As you can imagine, any criminal record on a 27-year-olds CV would be detrimental to many future opportunities. i.e. Those casual fare evader mental questions are: 1) Do I already have, or can I buy a ticket right now? If you want to do an apples to apples comparison go find satellite data and use it. While I agree with pretty much everything in this post, I think encouraging monthly passes is a mistake. The Wiki section on France is truly pathetic (not worth publishing or reporting but I am sure it was): A 2009 study found that the share of immigrants in the population has no significant impact on crime rates once immigrants economic circumstances are controlled for, while finding that unemployed immigrants tend to commit more crimes than unemployed non-immigrants.[83] A study by sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of studies at the EHESS, found that Muslims, mostly from North African origin, are becoming the most numerous group in [French prisons].[84][85] His work has been criticized for taking into account only 160 prisoners in 4 prisons, all close to northern Paris where most immigrants live. This is much more like parking violations or routine mistakes in tax filing. I profoundly disagree. The cost burden of commuting is unevenly and unethically distributed amongst the beneficiaries of this utility. Instead of developing an open system, they created an opaque Key farecard that offers many benefits to those who can afford it and severely penalizes those without it. Broadly: smartcards/ticket machines that actually work and are easy to use, cleaner network/new trains/reliability and half-height barriers/visible staff will do ya. Ref: Brief history of the Paris metro. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/10/24/numerology-in-transportation/#comment-67419. In most of the US, as you know, we need better service more than we need cheaper fares. Your second point sounds like moral panic. If you do Almost everyone in regular employment in Ile de France would have such a card. There are no large groups of transit users versus non-transit users locked in some zero-sum lethal fight over spoils (which in a US-context is really just the ordinary culture war conflict, transplanted on transit). The total cost of the new patrol program is $56 million in the first year, escalating by 8% annually thanks to a pre-agreed pay hike scale. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. They simply DO NOT BELIEVE fares apply to them Honestly, we are just. In the US and in certain conservative circles in the UK, public transit and the London Underground are merely a drag on public finances. For a small % this is an economic decision. If subsidized transit leads to people moving further out and leading more car oriented lives, it could even increase transportation costs, as people saved money on housing by moving to a further out area, but end up needing a car for many non-commute trips. Youll say that one doesnt rule out the other, but it seems that effectively it does. What happens if I just ignore the Notice? tfl fare evasion settle out of court. Fare Evasion Yeah, the lack of monthly caps on Oyster baffles me. The whole look at the poor person stealing bread, dont mind the banker stealing $1m. Some people got so infuriated that they went and sat in the First Class carriages (!) The notice contains details of the charge against you. > And the S-Bahn gets subsidies because of lower suburban ridership, same as the RER/Transilien.