“Touch In, Touch Out” Fare Payment:
Is this the Future?
1 September 2022
ABOVE: Go Cornwall 2401 (WA20 DVW) on route 46 from Camborne to Truro, somewhere on the outskirts of Truro, on Thursday 25th August 2022.
I have just returned from a week’s bus riding in Cornwall. I’m looking forward to sharing my travelling experiences with you soon, but I wanted to reflect today on the emerging form of bus ticketing that is “Tap On, Tap Off” contactless payment for fares. It’s something that Cornwall introduced across its network a few weeks ago.
What is Tap On, Tap Off?
For the uninitiated, “Tap On, Tap Off” (TOTO) is a means of paying for travel by tapping your contactless card on the ticket machine reader at the start of the trip , and tapping it off again on a specially-installed exit reader (like the one pictured above) at the end. You do not get a paper ticket.
The technology works out the fare to charge you based on your boarding and alighting points, and also ensures that the total cost does not exceed a specified ‘cap’ – which might be a daily or a weekly cap, or both. This is different from the system on buses in cities such as London, Bristol and Birmingham, which operate flat fares and only require a tap on at the start of the trip.
There are various TOTO schemes in place, notably on Trent Barton services and across Southern Vectis on the Isle of Wight, and they are springing up all over.
The Cornwall Scheme
But the Cornish scheme is the most widespread one I have come across. It covers any bus (with very, very limited exceptions, such as Park & Ride), of any operator, throughout the county, with a daily cap of £5 and a weekly cap of £20. As I was in Cornwall for a week, I thought I should give it a try.
Touching on is easy enough – just present your card in the normal way and wait for it to register (takes about three seconds). I boarded 28 buses during the week, and the only hitch was where one driver consciously covered the relevant section of the reader with his hand until he was sure that I wanted to “Tap and Cap”, as the process is known in Cornwall.
Touching off is more of a distraction. First, you have to remember to do it! Second, you have to have your card to hand as you get ready to disembark. I don’t know about you, but heading downstairs on a moving bus with a bag or two, and maybe jacket in hand, is hard enough, without having to have your card within reach as well!
It takes a moment for the card to register (two or three seconds), so alighting is going to be slower once a lot of people are touching out (although that should be counter-balanced by the quicker boarding).
ABOVE: Go Cornwall 537 (WJ65 BZD), an Enviro400, highlights the intrusive publicity for the cheap ticketing offer across Cornwall. Imagine what this looks like from the inside!
Tap-off readers not working
The biggest problem for me in Cornwall was that the majority of the exit readers I tried – not just one or two, but the majority – were not working. If you ‘forget’ to touch out you will be charged to the end of the journey. As most of my journeys were to the end of the line anyway, I didn’t view not being able to touch-out as a serious problem. But clearly there needs to be an improvement if the scheme is to catch on here.
And it hasn’t caught on yet. The scheme was launched on 26th July, but, one month later, in a week’s worth of travels, I only saw one other person using the facility – and only then because the driver suggested it to them.
A few diligent drivers made sure I had touched out (in cases where the tap-off readers were working; I did point out to one driver that the readers often were not). Most were tacit on the matter though. In one case I had a vehicle substitution midway through the journey and I wondered how that would have worked. (According to the FAQs that I looked at afterwards, “your driver will tell you what to do” – he didn’t.)
The worst example was a dual-door open-top bus, operated by First Kernow. Although dual-door, the tap-off reader was situated beside the front door. This bus, the ‘Land’s End Coaster’, was loading up at St Ives with a new set of passengers, who had already got as far as the bottom of the stairs and were waiting for the outgoing crowd, including me, to get off so that they could move upstairs. The result was a sea of people standing between me and the reader. I managed to squeeze through, but the reader wasn’t working anyway!
Two separate schemes: Plymouth & Cornwall
The Cornish scheme is also rather ambiguous in its definition. Go Cornwall also runs Plymouth Citybus with what looks, at first glance, like the same scheme (same description, same launch date, same headline prices). But the Plymouth scheme is separate. I made trips across the border on a couple of days during my stay and it played havoc with the charges (see below).
Charges
On the Monday and Thursday of my visit I was correctly charged £5.00 for each day. On these two days I stayed in Cornwall, although I did use services from both Go Cornwall and First Kernow. On the Tuesday and Wednesday, when I strayed into Devon, the charges were very different.
Tuesday’s charges were one of £3.50 and another of £5.50, making £9.00 in total. On this occasion, I took one Cornwall-exclusive journey (although the route in question – 75 Liskeard to Torpoint – only appears on the Plymouth Citybus website and not the Go Cornwall one). I took two local Plymouth journeys from ferries into the City Centre, and two cross-border services back into Cornwall.
An examination of the ticketing page of the Plymouth Citybus website reveals that there is a £9.00 day ticket that covers Plymouth buses as well as “the whole of Cornwall, but will only be accepted on Go Cornwall Bus services” (note that point). So that’s what I was charged that day. Whether any of this contributed to the Cornish cap, I don’t know (but see below).
Wednesday’s charges came to a shocking £12.50. I went into Plymouth from Liskeard, and came out again via the number 12 to Bude; otherwise I stayed in Cornwall. I was clearly capped at the £9.00 daily rate by Go Ahead, for using their services in both Plymouth and Cornwall. But do you recall that wording I quoted above, about the £9.00 day ticket only being “accepted on Go Cornwall Bus services”? So boarding a First Kernow service T1 (Truro to Penzance) later in the day upset that applecart, and I was charged a further £3.50 for the pleasure of that ride. (Incidentally, this is a day when I couldn’t touch out on any bus that I used, as none of the exit readers were working.)
But I’m still trying to work out how the weekly Cornwall cap of £20 was reached, as, on the Friday, I was charged only £3.00 in total, and nothing on the Saturday. I think that means that the charge of £3.50 for the T1 on Wednesday contributed, and one of the charges of £3.50 made on either Tuesday or Wednesday did as well – probably for the route 75 journey.
So I believe that I was charged correctly throughout, in accordance with the relevant business rules. But I shouldn’t need my 40-year old O-Level Maths to figure all that out.
Reflections on the Cornwall scheme
There are two big issues on the Cornwall scheme that need to be fixed quickly. The more immediate is the fact that so many tap-off readers don’t work. Clearly they need to if the scheme is to be successful (which I am sure it will be).
Second, it needs to be made clearer in publicity that higher charges apply if crossing into Devon. OK, I know Devon is not Cornwall, but one might expect a broadly Cornwall service that just crosses into Devon, such as the number 11 – Bodmin (shortly to be Padstow) to Plymouth – to be counted as part of the scheme and charged accordingly, in the same way as a TfL bus out-of-town to somewhere like Slough or Dorking is charged a London fare.
So maybe a footnote to the £5 claim to say that “services that cross into Devon are charged at a higher rate” would be in order. Yes, I know it’s obvious with the benefit of hindsight, but I’m just setting out what I was thinking whilst there.
Did I get "the best value fare"?
Having taken all of the above points into account, I think I probably did get the best value fares across the week – it just wasn’t as cheap as I had been led to believe it would be (£34.50 for the week, not £20.00). And, to be honest, I think I would have preferred to have paper tickets – at times I was certainly feeling nostalgic for them!
Having taken all of the above points into account, I think I probably did get the best value fares across the week – it just wasn’t as cheap as I had been led to believe it would be (£34.50 for the week, not £20.00). And, to be honest, I think I would have preferred to have paper tickets – at times I was certainly feeling nostalgic for them!
ABOVE: First Kernow Optare Solo 53505 (YJ56 AOU) at Mousehole, near Penzance, operating the local service known as … err … The Mousehole, on Saturday 27th August 2022. First Kernow is the other major operator in Cornwall, alongside Go Cornwall, and many of my rides during the week were with First.
Wider Application of TOTO
TOTO does feel like the way forward for fares collection in the longer-term, once the kit is fully reliable. For the passenger, it’s a simple way of ensuring that you pay the right fare, and the best fare. You don’t have to plan in advance for a day ticket or a weekly one. And if there are any regional and / or multi-operator schemes in place, TOTO can cap all that without you needing to worry.
TOTO is very useful if plans change, as you only pay for what you actually do. If you have bought a weekly ticket and your plans then change, you’re stuck with it, whilst TOTO means you pay as you go, and, if those plans change, you haven’t made / lost the initial outlay.
For the operator, it allows quicker boarding, and access to that all-important origin-destination data that is lost with day and period tickets.
There does of course need to be a back-office function to support all this. Fares paid need to be apportioned to the correct operator. Easy enough for single journeys / single operators, but how does it work once capping gets into the equation? How on earth do my costs from the last week get apportioned?
Hopefully the industry can work together on a single back-office support function to make TOTO schemes far more widespread. Some operators – notably Stagecoach – may need to buy new ticket machines…
Could Transport for London benefit from TOTO?
In the longer-term, TOTO is also the sort of scheme that could benefit Transport for London (TfL), as it removes the need for a flat fare to be applied. TfL went for the flat fare approach in order to speed up boarding, using the Oyster Card system. There are some ludicrously long journeys available (notably the X26 from West Croydon to Heathrow – discussed here).
Graduated fares could ensure that people pay more for longer journeys, and premiums could be applied to express and night routes. A better way of ensuring that fares cover their costs?
The biggest problem here, given how dishonest some London passengers are, would be ensuring that people did not touch-out as soon as they boarded, in order to pay the minimum fare. Such issues should not be insurmountable, though.
ABOVE: TfL buses parked up at Walthamstow Central bus station on Good Friday 15th April 2022, headed by Stagecoach London New Routemaster LT 375 (LTZ 1375, left), and by then-Tower Transit 16992 (BJ11 EAY, centre), a Volvo B9TL Wright Eclipse Gemini 2. Could TOTO enable TfL to reintroduce graduated fares on routes like the 58, which takes up to 81 minutes end-to-end?
The Way Forward?
I think TOTO is the way forward for fare collection, and I can envisage the time may come when one can board any bus in Britain with a contactless card and travel this way. Indeed, the industry should be working towards this. But the equipment needs to work and the ‘rules’ need to be clear.