It’s your duty to buy a ticket

Picture the scene… I get up nearly 45 mins late for work this morning. I throw myself out of bed, swearing and doing five things at once before running out of the house and managing to catch the last train that will allow me to arrive at work about 5 minutes late. I don’t have time to buy a ticket, thinking to myself ‘I’ll get one at the other end.’

Fast forward the 20 or so minutes it takes to get to St Pancras station from Tulse Hill, and I approach the guy on duty at the gate, nicely telling him I’d like to buy a ticket for my journey as I had to leave in a hurry and am running late for work. At which point things go not quite as I expect, with the guy at the gate telling me that I have to pay a 20 pound fine for not buying a ticket before boarding the train. My story doesn’t seem to interest him, nor the fact that I’m actually asking to buy a ticket rather than make up some bullshit story or, god forbid, jump the barriers (like the tens of people who do so everyday in front of station staff who don’t move a finger when it happens).

It seems that in my hurry I forgot I didn’t live in Japan anymore, where ticket machines at both end of a journey are standard and where, most importantly, you’re trusted to do/want to do the right thing ticket-fare wise rather than the opposite. In the UK, not having a ticket means you’re de facto a fare evader regardless of intent or circumstances. In Japan the de facto point of view is that you’ll do the right thing. And that makes a huge difference to not only how you feel travelling but also what you might actually choose to do when confronted with the choice of paying or evading a fare.

In both cases some people choose to not do the right thing. And yes it’s true that in the UK, not doing the right thing is probably much more common than in Japan, however when was the last time you were actually treated with some respect and given responsability for your choices by train companies? London Underground does generally let you pay at the other end but that can also often be a bit of a battle depending on who you’re dealing with, their mood and what you look like.

As I stood listening to station staff rationally arguing that it was my (and I quote) ‘duty to buy a ticket before boarding’ as I’m standing there asking to buy a ticket because I had no time to do so before boarding, I remembered just why I was happy to leave London the first time round. The first guy I was speaking with kept telling me how ‘you want to stand here for 10 hours mate and see what it’s like,’ and while I can understand that it’s probably not the nicest place to be for 10 hours as people try to get out of paying their fares, abuse you etc… I also wondered how often train line staff in this country choose to treat people without suspicion rather than automatically assume the defensive stance of ‘sorry mate, no can do, it’s the rules you have to pay a fine’. If it’s my duty to buy a ticket, how about you make it more convenient for me to do so, by putting ticket machines at both ends? It works everywhere else.

That wasn’t the worst of it though… the first exchange with the guy at the gate went something like this as I explained why I didn’t have time to buy my ticket:

Station staff – ‘If I caught my son riding a train without a ticket, I’d break his fingers’
Me – ‘Hold on a minute did you just say you’d break your son’s fingers for not buying a train ticket?’
Station staff – ‘Yeah’

At which point it hit me that arguing rationally might not get me anywhere. When you see the money poured into the infrastructure and other elements of public transport in this country and city and yet most trains and buses are still regularly late, staff are as rude as they ask people not to be to them and things are made as inconvenient as seemingly possible (but at least they look good, all modern and done up) it’s hard not to think that the priorities are totally screwed. Give me overly polite over this bullshit anytime of the day.