Those with an ounce of shame shove through the barriers behind you. The brazen simply jump over them. While at many stations without them simply walk on and off the train with so much as a tap. Fare dodging is rife in the capital, and it is far from a victimless crime.
Fare dodging costs Transport for London up to £150 million a year, while the cost to the rail industry as a whole is estimated to be £330 million. These are funds that would otherwise be ploughed back into the network. It also inevitably means a greater burden for funding services falls on the law-abiding – that is, the great majority of Londoners.
But one London commuter train service is fighting back. C2C, which operates between Fenchurch Street and stations in Essex, has witnessed a major rise in revenue from penalty fares after targeting persistent offenders. The firm has issued more than 8,000 fines and recovered more than £470,000 this year. Some long-term evaders have been ordered to repay nearly £10,000.
This has been achieved by boosting the number of revenue protection offerers and harnessing the use of technology, including a network of more than 2,0000 CCTV cameras. C2C has also used passenger ticketing data to analyse patterns of evasion and enabled ‘real time’ tracking of such instances.
No one, not even the most law-abiding of citizens, enjoys waiting at the barriers behind people who give the impression of never having used one before. But beyond the legal niceties, paying for the train, Tube, bus, or tram is simply part of the social contract. Like shoplifting, when these sorts of criminal activities become commonplace, it erodes trust as well as finances. In simple terms, it is unfair. Londoners should not have to put up with it, or the impact of such criminal activity on their vital services.
The Standard has long highlighted the injustices of the Single Justice Procedure, which has impacted many thousands of people wrongly convicted of offences, including those affecting rail passengers. We will continue to do so. But we ought not to turn a blind eye to basic criminality. If passengers don’t pay for a ticket, they should expect a fine and, in extremis, a criminal conviction. Those are the rules by which we must all abide.
