Ticket Office Closure Consultation

[whole diary]

[IndustryInsider]

And the ‘organisers’ blaming everyone but themselves.  The operators will be far too scared of upsetting the apple cart to fight back I suspect.

[grahame]

GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) Press release

More time for public to have their say as ticket office consultation deadline extended

Following feedback from passengers, the rail industry has given more time for the consultation on changes to ticket offices. The consultation will now close on Friday 1 September, 2023.

Input from passengers and independent watchdogs will help shape final proposals, so all rail users are supported as the railway responds to generational shifts in passenger buying habits.

The consultation is happening as part of an industry-wide set of proposals that would mean ticket office staff would work on station platforms and concourses where they can be closer to customers. Subject to consultation, ticket offices could be phased out over a number of years.

Ticket office staff would be freed up to work in other areas of the station where they are closer to customers and better placed to help, in line with models already in place at some Great Western Railway stations such as Newbury or Reading Green Park.

A new role, based on the existing station multi-skilled roles already in place on the GWR network since 2007, would be created to allow staff to help more customers with a wider range of issues. Instead of being confined to just one area, these roles would be able to help customers in many more ways – including those with additional accessibility needs - wherever they are on the station.

It is a way of working already in place at some Great Western Railway stations, including Newbury and Reading Green Park stations.

Customers’ use of online and digital ticketing has accelerated over the past four years, and today, just 14.5% of GWR tickets are sold at ticket offices. The changes would align the rail industry with many other retailers, including banks, which have offered counter-free services for over a decade.

The Passenger Assist programme – which helps disabled and mobility-impaired customers navigate stations and board trains – will not be affected by the changes. In fact, the proposals are designed to increase staff trained and available to help customers at stations across the network, including those with additional accessibility needs.

A spokesperson for GWR said:

“Digital tickets and mobile phones means our ticket office staff are helping around half the number of people they did in 2019.  It makes sense to move staff where they can be more help to more customers, and provide more training to help with a wider range of issues– like assisting those with reduced mobility through stations and onto our trains.

“This consultation is designed to allow the public to test and examine our proposals, and make sure our plans are compliant with the safeguards put in place at privatisation so that the needs of customers will still be met.”

Those who wish to have a say should visit: www.GWR.com/haveyoursay and follow the links to either Transport Focus or London TravelWatch, who are independently running the consultation,  by Friday 1 September.

Who benefits from these changes?

A key benefit of these changes is that they greatly improve the ability to make staff available at the right place and time to help customers face-to-face, rather than being restricted to just selling tickets from behind a glass window.

The plans would move staff to a new role, based on the principles of the station multi-skilled role – in place at GWR since 2007. This would allow staff to help more customers with a wider range of issues, including helping them to buy tickets, wherever they are on the station.

The changes also ensure a more visible staff presence around the station during staffed hours, on ticket concourses and on platforms where staff can also help deter anti-social behaviour.

I have a disability and can’t use ticket machines. Will I still get help at the station?

Yes. There will be more staff with more training on platforms and station concourses, helping passengers to plan journeys and use digital and self-service ticketing machines.

Two-thirds of GWR stations already operate without ticket offices, which means they have well-established arrangements that allow customers to travel without a ticket before buying on board trains or at their destination station if there is no other option.

The approach would help bring station retailing up-to-date from 1996, when the rules on how to sell tickets were set and before the invention of the smartphone. Back then, 82% of all tickets were sold at ticket offices nationally, compared to less than 15% on average today. Bringing staff out from offices would allow the railway to respond to the generational shift in customer behaviour, in common with many other industries and organisations that have long since done so such as Transport for London, most airlines and many banks and supermarkets.

[chuffed]

My observation FWIW^▸ (for what it's worth)...

Has anyone considered the following scenario.....



A blind person arrives at a station where the ticket offices are closed. He/she cannot see anyone on the concourse and is approached by someone who claims to be a uniformed member of staff and asks 'Can I help you?'.



The reply is 'I wish to buy a ticket to X from the machine.' He/she is escorted to the machine and the assister punches the details which just happen to be a first class return journey to the furthest point on the network. He then asks the blind person for their card, guides their hand over the keypad and watches as they tap in their pin number. In a very short period of time, the assister pockets the printed ticket.... and the card with the pin number...leaving the blind person with no ticket and no card with the pin number having been divulged.



This may be an extreme example, but it raises the question of just how secure a vulnerable person would be without a designated ticket office. Perhaps a machine in a booth with a shelter should be designated with a member of staff manning it ......isn't that just what the proposal is trying to get rid of ?



I do hope my illustration highlights the very real concern I feel about the closure of ticket offices.

[TaplowGreen]

What generally happens in your scenario currently whereby a blind person arrives at a station where the ticket office is closed/doesn't exist?

[Red Squirrel]

What generally happens in your scenario currently whereby a blind person arrives at a station where the ticket office is closed/doesn't exist?

That is a very good question! According to the RNIB^» (Royal National Institute for the Blind - about), 3% of blind and partially-sighted people are able to use ticket vending machines. These machines are not designed for accessibility.

[Marlburian]

I'm trying to work out how the closure would affect Tilehurst Station, which survives being unstaffed in the afternoon and night. In the mornings will the nice lady lurk outside her closed office helping passengers to use the machine - when it's working?  Or, as I suspect, will the station become completely unpersonned?

On the matter of blindness, though still legal to drive, I have trouble reading the screen when the sun is in a certain position. And, approaching senility as I am, I have trouble becoming familiar with new IT. (I keep on promising myself that I'll try the new self-service check-outs at Waitrose down the road but ... I did try the new machines at the Coop in Overdown Road, only to find that their sequence was different to those at the Coop in Theale, which I can use with aplomb.)

Will being dazzled and near-senile count as excuses explanations for  travelling without a ticket?

[Bmblbzzz]

I have a friend who's registered blind – and deaf. She's partially sighted and, erm, partially "hearinged", so is able to use screens with suitable modifications, which she has at home (font size, contrast, choice of colours, etc) but can't be done to a ticket machine. So she prefers to buy tickets online and either get them posted or pick them up from a machine, depending how much far in advance she's purchased. She doesn't like to use ticket offices because her hearing impairment makes communication difficult (station concourses can be a noisy environment as well).

But that's her, each person with sight or hearing disabilities will be slightly different.

[IndustryInsider]

I'm trying to work out how the closure would affect Tilehurst Station, which survives being unstaffed in the afternoon and night. In the mornings will the nice lady lurk outside her closed office helping passengers to use the machine - when it's working?  Or, as I suspect, will the station become completely unpersonned?

Well, the documentation from GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) states that the staffing levels are to remain unchanged, but the ticket office will close.

I suspect in this case and with the many other small stations with similar layouts, the existing ticket office room will be kept as it provides the only welfare accomodation, and I doubt Costa will be interested!  It's the only sensible place for a member of staff to be located (all passengers pass by or through it to access the station) barring the unlikely event they might be able to assist elsewhere.  The only change will be the removal of the ticket issuing equipment - which of course is very useful to deal with enquiries, do refunds and change of travel excesses and the many other things TVM^▸ (Ticket Vending Machine)'s are currently unable to do.

[JayMac]

Opinion piece from Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian:

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^▸ (QR Code - Quick Response code) 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^▸ (Member of Parliament) 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.

[Bmblbzzz]

Definitely agree about human-to-human face-to-face interaction.

And yes I'm aware of the irony of writing that on the internet.

[TaplowGreen]

Opinion piece from Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian:

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^▸ (QR Code - Quick Response code) 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^▸ (Member of Parliament) 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.

The Banking analogy is an interesting one - I seem to recall some time ago that there was an agreement between the Banks that at least one would remain open in an area where branches were closing, then there were going to be "hubs", but both seemed to be quietly forgotten, and now Post Offices (themselves far harder to find these days) pick up some of the functionality.

Access to F2F Banking is of far more importance to the vast majority of the population than access to a station ticket office - I would say that the number of customers using Bank branches remains higher than the 12%  using ticket offices, notwithstanding online banking, ATMs^‡(resolve) etc..................personally I can't recall the last time I used a cheque.

A debate I watched recently about Bank branch closures featured a representative from the industry who said words to the effect of "how much more would customers be prepared to pay for our services in order to keep branches open?"

Whether rail travellers would be prepared to pay a supplement along similar lines to retain ticket offices is perhaps moot?

I suspect that the supermarkets have similar thoughts in mind when it comes to self service tills - in my branch of Sainsburys there was much moaning when they arrived and long queues at the tills that remained open, however that's definitely changing as (not only) older people become more comfortable with the technology.

The overall message I think is that hard though it may be for some to adapt, this is only going in one direction.

[grahame]

From The Mirror

Jeremy Hunt complained about railway ticket office closures in his own area the day before Government-backed plans to shut almost every one in England were unveiled.

The Chancellor contacted South Western Railway, which runs services in his South West Surrey constituency, earlier this month to raise concerns about the impact on local passengers. The next day train operators announced they want to close ticket offices at 974 stations across England.

[IndustryInsider]

Objections to the closure plan now at 315,000 with just under a month to go.

https://railnews.mobi/news/2023/08/03-objections-to-ticket-office-closures.html

[CyclingSid]

One assumes that the vast majority of those will not be in favour of the idea. Elsewhere that number would be sufficient to get a debate in parliament?

[Electric train]

One assumes that the vast majority of those will not be in favour of the idea. Elsewhere that number would be sufficient to get a debate in parliament?

I have a feeling that there will be some token gesture closures but the plan will be batted into the future past the General Election, MP^▸ (Member of Parliament)'s have a weak stomach when it come to things that might upset voters leading up to a General Election