Andrew Gilligan: Lost In The Machine

FOR A few kinds of simple customer transaction, machines are as good as people: taking out cash from a bank, buying a ticket to park your car. But for anything with any element of complication or choice, they are lousy.
 
Buying a ticket at the machine at the “Greenwich end” of Greenwich station takes four or five times as long as buying one at the ticket office.  Even for the simplest journey, to London, you have to go through two pages on the touchscreen; for most others, you have to press as many as ten buttons. God help you if you are using a railcard. Almost invariably, the machine will reject one or more of the coins you put in; you have to reinsert them, sometimes several times, and sometimes it will never accept them – a problem if you have no more change. Once you have fed in all the coins, there is then a pause before the ticket is grudgingly printed and delivered – a pause usually just long enough to allow you to miss your train.
 
Tourists and others not familiar with the machines take a long time over each step, further lengthening the process. None of the machines is the same – there are three different kinds at Greenwich alone, one involving an even more fiddly little wheel that you have to twiddle. And if there is more than one person in your party, you have to repeat the ticket-buying process all over again (unless you are quick enough to spot the multiple-tickets option on some machines.) 
 
If the ticket office ever happens to be closed during the day, a long and slow-moving queue quickly builds up at the “Greenwich end” machine. And none of the machines, so far as I know, can give directions, tell you what train to catch, or warn you, before you’ve paid over your money, that the service is a bit dodgy today and you might like to try another route.
 
Remember all this when our beloved local train operator, Southeastern, comes forward with proposals to close the ticket offices at our local stations, or reduce their opening hours, and replace them with machines. It hasn’t happened yet: plans a few years ago for ticket office closures were defeated, and have not so far returned. But it is happening now on other train companies, and it will almost certainly soon come to south-east London too.
 
Of course, if Southeastern would like publicly to pledge in the comments section that there will be no reductions in its ticket office hours, I’d be most happy to stand corrected. But I shan’t hold my breath.
 
The fact is that the privatised railways are in deep trouble. Their operating costs are exorbitant (public subsidy to the network is several times greater than it was under BR, and fares have risen far above inflation, for a service certainly no better and arguably worse than BR’s). During the boom years, the rail companies could get away with loading their extravagance and inefficiency on to the rest of us; passengers did seem prepared, if not exactly content, to suffer yearly above-inflation fare rises and rotten services.
 
But now, the recession has put whole financial model of railway privatisation at risk. Passenger numbers are likely to crash very soon, as more people lose their jobs. Fare rises are indexed to inflation in July each year, plus one per cent; inflation this July is likely to be pretty near zero. The train operators have already been pleading with the Government to drop the rule and allow them to raise fares by the usual larcenous amounts. Today, perhaps surprisingly, the transport minister, Lord Adonis, told the Commons that he would refuse those demands.
 
So a double whammy is in effect: fewer passengers, no fare increases. With any luck, some of the companies will be unable to meet their franchise commitments and will have to hand back the keys to the Government. We will start to achieve renationalisation, a sane and unified railway, by stealth, and for nothing. Bring it on, I say.
 
Some companies, however, may try an interim option, of trying to cut costs. Not, of course, cutting their own fat-cat salaries and bonuses; probably not cutting dividends to shareholders; not trying to squeeze out the enormous waste in the Balkanised system – some of it, to be fair, the fault of Network Rail and the train leasing companies rather than theirs.
 
No, as Keith Ludeman, the ultimate boss of Southeastern, says, the option they will be trying first is “going to the Department [for Transport] and asking to take services out.” Cutting actual trains is quite complicated – involving negotiations with other operators and Network Rail as well as the DfT – although train lengths can be shortened. The service most at risk of being “taken out” is staffing at stations. Already Southeastern’s website tells visitors that the weekday opening hours of Greenwich station are “unknown.” Not to me, they’re not – the ticket office is currently supposed to be open until at least 7.30pm every weeknight.
 
Even a staffing cut has to be approved by the DfT. So it is our task to bring pressure to bear to ensure that “unknown” does not turn into “unstaffed.”