Why does every metro system use a different fare structure?
This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2018.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are wandering through the
old town of Amsterdam. As a tourist, you might not be au fait with the smartcard system there, so you buy a “1 hour
ticket” to travel across the city. You check in upon entering your first mode
of transport, and then you’re free to mix transport modes as much as you like
until your hour is up, when you are obliged to check out.
This is only one fare of many different types that exist in
Amsterdam, but it already differs radically from how things work in London. Here,
buses and trams are consistently separate from the Underground and Overground
when it comes to how much you pay. The only similarity is that both London and
Amsterdam will ask you to pay extra if you want to use a national rail service.
To make it plain, the difference is thus: fares align in
Amsterdam – everything is included in the same fare, and it’s how long you
travel for, not exactly where you travel to, that affects the price. Outside of
airports, there is no zone structure like in London.
On the Thames, price differentiation is king. A bus costs
less than a tube which costs less if you don’t use Zone 1 but costs an arm and
a leg if you commute in from Chesham – but that journey from Chesham won’t cost
any more if you travel back out again, to say, Upminster. This is confusing and
impenetrable to anyone who isn’t a transport nerd. Why don’t London’s fares
align? Why can’t cities agree on how to manage their fares?
In New York, the fare system is extremely simple and clear
cut. One journey to anywhere costs exactly the same, no matter how you do it or
where you go - but changing to a different mode of transport starts a new
journey. This system works for New York because its public transit keeps
relatively close to the city centre – there’s no equivalent of the Metropolitan
Line included in the fare structure.
In Paris, they took New York’s system and made it as
confusing as London’s version; there’s one universal ticket price, but you can
also change within 90 minutes. You can change from Metro to RER (think Paris’s
Crossrail), and you can change from a tram to a bus, but crucially, you can’t
change from a metro to a bus. However, these rules only apply within the
subway-dense “City of Paris” – RER lines beyond “Zone 1” can get expensive,
fast.
In Tokyo, they take a different tact to mixing modes;
there’s no ability to change without incurring a new fare, but each fare is
determined on the basis of distance alone. If you travelled 10km by metro and
then took the bus one stop, you would – intuitively – expect the bus ticket to
be cheaper than the metro. And that’s how they manage it in Tokyo, on a
case-by-case kilometer basis[1].
A moment of reflection might lead you to realise that it
seems blatantly intuitive that public transport should work this way. For one,
it’s how most transport works outside of urban centres; the further you go, the
more you pay. That’s why so many people balked at Sian Berry’s suggestion to
remove the fare structure entirely when she ran for London Mayor.
And yet – as we’ve discussed – the current design already
leads to instances of total nonsense. You could travel from Chesham to Baker
Street or Chesham to Upminster, and even though the latter is a journey twice
as long, you’d pay the same, for travelling through through just as many zones.
If we were in Tokyo, we wouldn’t have this problem; all metro-stops are equal
in their eyes.
But it pays to stop and consider why cities can treat their
fare structures differently. Why does London have so many confusing zones, complete
with “special fares apply”? Why does Paris have to lay an arbitrary divide
beyond its old city boundary? Why doesn’t Tokyo? The classic retort of “look at
a map” pays dividends here.
Tell someone that Chesham is a dense urban area and they’ll
laugh at you. In Tokyo, meanwhile, a satellite view pays testament to the
far-reaching density of the suburbs; this is one reason why Tokyo’s urban area
is so populous. If we look to Paris, the logic is the same; a unified fare
structure within the urban centre make sense because it is a near-uniform area
of high density where trends in travel are consistent. London is one of the
greenest capital cities in the world, and part of the reason is that,
administratively, its edges are packed with open spaces stranded in the green
belt. And yet, metro stations expecting the density of Kilburn appear in
Stanmore.
This is just one reason in a sea of issues that make it
harder for cities to regulate their fare structures in no-nonsense, easily
understandable ways. London’s ongoing advertising campaign for the “Wonderful
World of Off-Peak” is testament to a desire to simplify what travellers
expect to pay on their journey. Perhaps in a world with a less restricted TfL
budget, a reduced commitment to freezing fares, or a more homogenous urban geography,
we could hope for a better fare structure. But in the meanwhile - for better or
for worse – “special fares apply”.
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