Oyster refunds for £15m 'errors'

Tube travel: people who forget to touch out will escape penalties
12 April 2012

Hundreds of thousands of Tube passengers overcharged for 'honest mistakes' will share in a £15 million annual refund.

Commuters who accidentally forget to touch out will escape penalty fares in the biggest change to Oyster technology.

A new tracking system will "remember" the journeys passengers usually take - and make sure they are not overcharged. The change follows growing concern over Transport for London's annual £60 million income from excess fares.

Caroline Pidgeon, chairwoman of the London Assembly transport committee, said: "At long last TfL are waking up to the fact that serious overcharging takes place with Oyster." TfL currently charges passengers who fail to swipe their Oyster card the maximum fare for the Tube or the railway.

But the new system spots occasions when commuters forget to touch out - and will charge them the correct fare instead. This could save passengers about £15 million a year, the amount TfL believes is overpaid annually by people paying up to £4.50 for an "uncompleted" Tube trip or £6.50 for trains.

Shashi Verma, TfL's director of fares and ticketing, said: "The system is very sophisticated already but it can't distinguish between an honest mistake and somebody who is trying to take the system for a ride.

"We will fix an honest mistake if we can figure out from the card what should have happened."
The system applies to all pay-as-you-go Oyster cards, which are used for about 7.5 million trips a week. TfL believes "incomplete" journeys account for about two per cent of trips.

The Oyster computer runs 14 checks on these journeys to establish if passenger error was to blame. The process of repaying money direct to the Oyster cards begins three days later.

The new system is able to remember the "symmetry" of repeated journeys, for example, between a home and office. If a commuter fails to touch out at his home station but then begins a journey there the following morning, the computer will assume he returned there the previous evening.

About 40,000 people a day are charged a maximum fare - which differs from a penalty fare imposed on fare dodgers - but many are corrected automatically or by passengers calling the Oyster helpline or complaining to station staff.

The remainder will now be processed through the new software.

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