Re: Daily Telegraph (Sydney) today (5 July)

[G.Lambert@unsw.edu.au (Geoff Lambert)]

G.Lambert@unsw.edu.au (Geoff Lambert) wrote:


>>Today's Daily Telegraph has a full front-page story on fare evasion 

Comment

About 18 months ago, I asked about this phenomenon here in this
newsgroup after encountering "locked open" barriers about 90% of the
time at City Circle stations during the Christmas - New Year week.  At
the time, David Johnson reported that automatic barriers must be
locked open when there is no-one there to supervise them. (a very
Irish policy, that is)

The practice still continues though, even when staff are there.  I
would support the observations of the Terrorgraph in all that they saw
(apart from their confusion about what "guards" are, etc.)  Yesterday,
for instance, I travelled Town Hall- Central, Central-Hawkesbury
River-Central, Central-Quay, all barriers open at all stations, no
ticket checks anywhere.  

At places where there aren't auto-barriers, there is never any
checking as far as I can see.  In recent months, I've travelled to or
from Meadowbank, Newtown, St Leonards, Burwood, Erskineville,
Chatswood, Campbelltown (also Talong and Wondabyne, but they don't
count) and never had any sort of a check of my ticket, despite the
gates often being staffed.  It is easy to avoid the barriers where
they exist and are operating:- one only needs to gesture to the
attendant and she/he will let you through the "manual" barrier.  You
could wave a pakapoo ticket at them foir all they know.  In many
instances, Circular Quay, especially, you practically get INVITED to
go through the manual barrier at crowded times.

The question raised by the Terrorgraph as to the likely revenue loss
is a good one, I've always thought it must be larger than Cityrail
estimates, although their estimates have ranged from $2 to $50 million
in recent years, which is itself an indictment of the system.
Cityrail obviously knows how much revenue it collects from the farebox
figures, but it probably doesn't know how many passengers it carries
asnd how far they travel.  It can have no hope of knowing how many
people travel without having had to pay.  Traditionally passenger
journey statistics have been calculated from ticket sales of
single-trip and multi-trip tickets.  Sometimes, especially for contry
trains, statistics have been compiled from tickets collected at the
end of journeys.  Sales of multi-trip or periodical tickets have
tradtionally been translated into numbers of journeys by multiplying
by an assumed number of trips per ticket.  This assumed number is
taken from occasional surveys and has been dropping most of this
century.  Passenger-kilometres travelled are calculated by multiplying
the journey assumptions, by further assumptions about the average
length of jouyrney, itself estimated from a blending ot ticket sales
statistics and surveys.  There are no hard and fast figures anywhere
in the base data, probably plus or minus 10% would be a reasonable
margin for error on journey numbers, 10 to 20% on
passenger-kilometres.  On this basis, to estimate losses to revenue
from fare-evasion and failure to scrutinise tickets is just silly.
Ten times this could easily be closer to reality.

Geoff Lambert