TfL considers Taylor Swift-style 'dynamic pricing' for Tube journeys

[Meglos]

This was sourced from the Evening Standard URL below :

TfL considers Taylor Swift-style 'dynamic pricing' for Tube journeys

A Government announcement on rail fare rises is due imminently

www.standard.co.uk

Transport for London is considering whether to introduce Taylor Swift-style “dynamic pricing” to get more people travelling by Tube.

TfL chiefs and Sadiq Khan’s top transport advisor were asked whether dynamic pricing, when prices fall or rise with demand, could be used to address changing commuter travel patterns resulting from hybrid or home working during and since the pandemic.

Seb Dance, Mr Khan’s deputy mayor for transport, was asked by Lib-Dem Caroline Pidgeon at a London Assembly meeting on Tuesday whether TfL might introduce “more differentiation between types of services”, such as “dynamic fare pricing”, when the annual fares review happen next March.

Mr Dance replied: “It’s a decision for the mayor but it’s also on the advice of TfL as well, as well as my own [advice].

“In terms of dynamic fare pricing, there are many different variations of what that looks like, and TfL has indeed been tasked with looking at various options.....

 

[Taunton]

Good luck with programming Oyster for that, and letting people know before travelling (which is what is done by airlines/concerts etc as the seat bookings come in) how much they will be charged.

If Mr Mayor wants to treat London travel as a revenue opportunity rather than a public service, we have an election coming up ...

 

[birchesgreen]

What a stupid idea. Is this something they have been nudged into by the DfT?

 

[OscarH]

TfL commissioner Andy Lord said TfL was examining the use of dynamic pricing by other world cities – but warned that the Oyster and Contactless ticketing system was getting dated and may not have the capacity or be flexible enough – without an upgrade - to cope with surge ticking.
“There are some hard IT challenges,” he said

Given it's 2023, and they can't even support railcard discounted contactless, I don't see this happening on contactless anytime soon. And forget about Oyster, good luck getting those Cubic gatelines to do anything more complicated

 

[Bletchleyite]

I can't see this going anywhere, not least for these reasons:

1. Short distance journeys (unlike long distance ones) are typically not time-flexible, so they won't do anything for shifting loadings around with it.

2. Noting (1), the reason Uber does it isn't to profiteer or move loadings around, it's so when things are busy they can pay drivers more to encourage them to come out and drive if they're sat at home watching the telly. That isn't how public transport works and so isn't applicable to TfL.

 

[Taunton]

the reason Uber does it isn't to profiteer or move loadings around, it's so when things are busy they can pay drivers more to encourage them to come out and drive if they're sat at home watching the telly. That isn't how public transport works and so isn't applicable to TfL.

You also get into unintended consequences. Uber drivers have sussed how the surge pricing algorithm works, and switch off at certain times, the system identifies a shortage, then they switch back on again once they have forced the pricing to go up.

 

[birchesgreen]

Which "other world cities" use this kind of thing btw?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Which "other world cities" use this kind of thing btw?

None I've ever heard of. Indeed, most countries don't even have an off-peak on regional and urban services, though some German systems do have "after 9am" seasons and day tickets.

 

[Thirteen]

Good luck with programming Oyster for that, and letting people know before travelling (which is what is done by airlines/concerts etc as the seat bookings come in) how much they will be charged.

If Mr Mayor wants to treat London travel as a revenue opportunity rather than a public service, we have an election coming up ...

TfL needs extra money to pay for upgrades and new rolling stock, that's just cold hard facts.

Dynamic pricing probably needs to tested first to see if it actually works but I think the current Oyster system needs to be upgraded to more in line with newer technology like OMNY in NYC.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

What a stupid idea. Is this something they have been nudged into by the DfT?

Almost certainly.

It'll also destroy the zonal system that is so core to the TfL business plan...

 

[Bletchleyite]

It'll also destroy the zonal system that is so core to the TfL business plan...

The zonal system creates all manner of anomalies with tap in, tap out ticketing. I'm genuinely surprised they kept it. Point to point fares (even if you base them on a loose rule of some kind to ease calculation, be that distance or assumed zones) work much better.

The Dutch got rid of their zonal system when they implemented OV-Chipkaart, that's calculated on a fixed starting fee plus a per-vehicle-kilometre rate set by each operator.

 

[HSTEd]

TfL needs extra money to pay for upgrades and new rolling stock, that's just cold hard facts.

Well, it could always cut operational expenditures....

Dynamic pricing probably needs to tested first to see if it actually works but I think the current Oyster system needs to be upgraded to more in line with newer technology like OMNY in NYC.

The cost of doing anything to Oyster now will far exceed any reasonable increase in income from dynamic pricing!

Oyster is now the Oyster that will exist for the foreseeable future, the time to add this capability was when it was being rolled out.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Oyster is now the Oyster that will exist for the foreseeable future, the time to add this capability was when it was being rolled out.

Perhaps not quite that, but more *contactless* now is the contactless that will exist for the foreseeable future. There is a plan to move Oyster onto the contactless backoffice so both would offer the same features and validity area. The old cards would still work, but would only be used as an identification method, the stored value on the physical card would be ignored.

 

[jon81uk]

Oyster is now the Oyster that will exist for the foreseeable future, the time to add this capability was when it was being rolled out.

The current version of Oyster is already planned to be replaced with something more like contactless where the processing is done in the back end not when the card is tapped.

 

[yorksrob]

Rail fares generally need to be predictable and reliable. Surge pricing is the opposite of this

 

[birchesgreen]

Rail fares generally need to be predictable and reliable. Surge pricing is the opposite of this

Yes, unlike concerts which are one offs, tube fares can be a daily expense (which you can't exactly opt out of if you are going to work!) so need to be predictable.

 

[Taunton]

TfL needs extra money to pay for upgrades and new rolling stock, that's just cold hard facts.
.

That's just a part of routine rolling stock renewals that has always come out of established funds - replacement rolling stock broadly is the same amount per year over the long term. It's not a reason to impose yet another revenue source on the passengers.

 

[AdamWW]

I can an argument for a finer-grained system of different fares at different times (and routes), and maybe "surge pricing" so that after a concert or whatever people have an incentive not to travel straight away and TfL can get more money from those who won't or can't wait. (Not an argument I'd personally support).

It seems rather strange to be talking about airline style dynamic pricing though.

The only way I could see that working on TfL would be the Swiss system of day tickets with demand pricing that get more expensive as the day of validity approaches. And I'm not sure how helpful that would be.

 

[BwniCymraeg]

Yes, unlike concerts which are one offs, tube fares can be a daily expense (which you can't exactly opt out of if you are going to work!) so need to be predictable.

This is the key point for me, you cannot feasibly suggest (without sounding mad, at least) that commuters’ weekly budgets should be prepared to shoulder potentially dramatic differences in cost for something as simple as travelling to work.

 

[AdamWW]

This is the key point for me, you cannot feasibly suggest (without sounding mad, at least) that commuters’ weekly budgets should be prepared to shoulder potentially dramatic differences in cost for something as simple as travelling to work.

I think predictability is perhaps under appreciated.

It's all very well having market based pricing and clearly many people benefit from cheap advance tickets.

But if you're going to buy a house somewhere that you'll have to commute to work from it's good to have some degree of certainty over what it will cost to do so, rather than find that someone has tweaked an algorithm and suddenly your costs of getting to work have doubled or tripled.

 

[Hadders]

What a silly idea. I thought it was 1st April.

 

[danm14]

Would this even be legal?

Tap your contactless card, get charged a random amount of money that you aren't entitled to know beforehand.

With other surge pricing, you are entitled to see the price before agreeing to pay it or not.

 

[AdamWW]

Would this even be legal?

Tap your contactless card, get charged a random amount of money that you aren't entitled to know beforehand.

With other surge pricing, you are entitled to see the price before agreeing to pay it or not.

If you wanted to go down this route (and I very much doubt that it would happen) it would be easy enough these days to have displays letting people know the current state of play.
You'd presumably have to base prices on when someone tapped in otherwise it would be somewhat unreasonable.

 

[birchesgreen]

If you wanted to go down this route (and I very much doubt that it would happen) it would be easy enough these days to have displays letting people know the current state of play.
You'd presumably have to base prices on when someone tapped in otherwise it would be somewhat unreasonable.

How do you achieve that though without causing chaos at the barriers?

 

[Richardr]

If you wanted to go down this route (and I very much doubt that it would happen) it would be easy enough these days to have displays letting people know the current state of play.
You'd presumably have to base prices on when someone tapped in otherwise it would be somewhat unreasonable.

For all of the available contactless fares from the station?

 

[birchesgreen]

For all of the available contactless fares from the station?

Going to have to have a rather large electronic display...

 

[stuu]

If TfL (and I sincerely hope they don't) go down this road, then you would have a big display saying "High passenger numbers, minimum fare £5 for next 30 minutes" or something, rather than any more granular breakdown. They could do that on a station by station basis according to traffic levels

 

[AdamWW]

If TfL (and I sincerely hope they don't) go down this road, then you would have a big display saying "High passenger numbers, minimum fare £5 for next 30 minutes" or something, rather than any more granular breakdown. They could do that on a station by station basis according to traffic levels

Quite.

I was imagining either a simple add-on or multiplier for journeys starting at each station.

If you want to dynamically choose an appropriate fare for every possible station pair that contactless is valid on then:
1) It would be rather hard to communicate other than via a journey planner
2) It would be utter madness.

Of course if the idea was for TfL journeys to be priced both on time of travel and purchase date, with a fixed punitive fare for walk-up travel, then that problem goes away.
The fare is just whatever it was when you booked it.
And this probably could be done even now by only changing the back office system at least for people using contactless rather than Oyster - the routines that currently sort out things like capping could to look for a match for your journey with a pre-purchased one and price accordingly.
But - even if the idea was to book journeys for a time period rather than particular departure, it seems an even madder idea.

 

[thomalex]

Isn't this essentially peak time pricing?

On weekdays we all know when the surges are going to be, 7-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. Given this is predictable I'm not sure why they would need dynamic pricing to establish when to charge more.

 

[gordonthemoron]

Isn't this essentially peak time pricing?

On weekdays we all know when the surges are going to be, 7-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. Given this is predictable I'm not sure why they would need dynamic pricing to establish when to charge more.

I suppose they could change off peak to peak at busy stations, but with capping, what’s the point?