Rejoice, rejoice: the railway ticket office may yet be saved for the nation. Or more likely, it’s at least earned a brief reprieve. After a public outcry against plans to shut booths staffed by real live humans, train operators have relented and extended what was a suspiciously short three-week consultation.
Passengers will now have until September to make their point, shifting the exercise from a seemingly done deal to something at least vaguely pretending to be an open question, and hopefully allowing the voices of anxious disabled passengers in particular to be heard. It’s a victory, too, for anyone still foxed by the mad complexities of British train ticketing or forced by the general chaos, cancellation and delay towards the battle-scarred veterans of the ticket office, invariably the only people in the station who seem to know what’s actually happening. But beyond that, it sheds some light on how we all might like to be treated in an age of rapid automation.
The railways are hardly the only industry in which humans are steadily giving way to machines, with painful consequences for anyone who either can’t or won’t scan a QR code, email a bot, or risk a parking fine because they’ve failed to figure out one of the endless apps and automated systems taking over from the old-school habit of feeding coins into a slot.
Galling as it clearly is for Nigel Farage to find himself shunned by Coutts, the drama over whether one man’s bank account should have been closed, or what the bank should have subsequently disclosed about his private finances, is arguably not the most pressing access issue in a world where 5,695 high street bank or building society branches have closed in little over eight years.
Confidentiality in banking obviously very much matters, as does political impartiality. But still, it would be nice to see Downing Street taking the same level of anxious interest in pensioners who can’t get the hang of internet banking, or people who for whatever reason don’t have access to mobile phones.
The days when everyone had to queue up to pay in cheques (gen Z readers, ask your grandparents) or get money out over the counter are obviously long gone, giving banks the chance to save a fortune by shutting down staffed branches. It’s second nature now for millions of us to move money around by banking app, to the point where we rarely even touch hard cash, just as it is to buy and store train tickets on a mobile phone.
But what if you’re in your 80s, with cataracts, and don’t want to struggle with doing everything on a blurry screen, worrying all the time that you’ve hit the wrong button or might be being conned? What if you find the whole thing confusing and frightening, and just want to talk to a real person face to face rather than sit on hold endlessly to a call centre, or attempt to explain yourself to a chatbot?
For anyone young enough to regard an actual live telephone call as an act of unpardonable violence, organising your life through the medium of a screen may be fine; for their grandparents, perhaps not so much.
The same is true of supermarkets, where most of us are now perfectly used to swiping our own barcodes in return for skipping the checkout queue. But watching the pool of human cashiers shrink to a token handful, while what was once an equally token handful of self-service tills expands to fill most of the floor space, triggers a very particular kind of guilt. How must it feel to see that army of machines physically advancing towards your job, week by week? And what about all the lonely, shuffling shoppers for whom a friendly chat at the conveyor belt might be the only human contact they get in a week?
When I was at home on maternity leave with a tiny, howling baby, there were times when exchanging pleasantries with a stranger in Sainsbury’s was pretty much the social highlight of the day. Though the pandemic has accustomed us to a more antiseptic culture of doing everything online, the suffering of so many who found themselves painfully isolated in lockdown should also have taught us a salutary lesson.
The “chat checkouts” introduced some years back by the Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo, for customers who would actively rather linger over their shopping, were part of a government programme to combat loneliness (with all its associated health and social costs) that could easily be copied here. They might only serve a handful of customers, but they meet a bigger need.
The UN agency Unesco’s warning this week against relying on mobiles and tablets in the classroom, meanwhile, is best interpreted in Britain – where most schools have long since imposed strict rules on phones – as a warning shot against screens being deployed as a cut-price alternative to teachers in the age of artificial intelligence. We are barely in the foothills yet of what AI at work will do to human interaction, which seems all the more reason to put down some markers.
Rail operators insist that only 12% of passengers still buy tickets directly from an office, and that liberating staff from behind their plastic windows means they’ll be free to roam stations dispensing friendly help and advice. (Oddly enough, unions don’t buy that, suspecting the more likely outcome is job cuts.) But even if it were true, that 12% often have reasons that can’t simply be swept aside.
The former Paralympian athlete and crossbench peer Tanni Grey-Thompson warns that it’s people on the ground in stations who effectively make travel for disabled passengers possible (though often barely so). The Labour MP Marsha de Cordova, who is registered blind, says only 3% of people with sight loss can use a ticket machine. And what about up to a million Britons who will soon be living with dementia? In the early stages of Alzheimer’s it’s still possible to live a surprisingly independent life, given the occasional bit of help from a human.
Behind all of these in the queue, meanwhile, trail baffled tourists, people who can’t believe there isn’t a cheaper way of doing this (surprisingly often there is, though the ticket machines don’t tell you), and everyone enraged to find the touchscreen frozen yet again. And yes, eventually ticket offices will probably go the way of steam trains and station porters. But this week should be a salutary lesson to cost-cutting companies (and governments) that hustling everyone through this transition too fast is a false economy. This is one journey where slow and steady beats a cold, heartless rush.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
