Brilliant idea.

One ticket for all people travelling would save print/stationary costs, through the seat reservation details would only relate to a single person, which causes an issue.

I’d want to see the date without the hyphens, just to improve readability.

I’d want to go further and make the purchase process at the self service ticket machines easier to use, along with the terminology (advance, super advance, etc)

I like this a lot – but i think there’s a reason why reservations are printed seperately. You don’t have to get a reservation at the same time that you book your ticket. If you have an open return for example, you can get a reservation anything up to a few hours before the train you want to get leaves it’s initial station.

Therefore they’d still need some kind of reservation only ticket.

What would it say on the ticket when you don’t need a reservation, if it’s valid for a whole month for example?

Ticketing is long overdue a reform. The problem is that the credit card sized tickets were designed before they introduced hugely complex rules, with “zero-tolerance” fines for non compliance. I struggle to understand some of the rules, and explain them to others, and English is my first language. I shudder at how difficult it must be for tourists, who may speak little or no English. We then get the difficult of what happens when the train you’re booked on to is cancelled or departs late.

Travelling in Germany, I got 2 A4 sheets of paper (one for each direction) with each leg of my journey printed on, in English, complete with departure times, platform and seat numbers. The bottom of the paper was the tear off ticket – no need to tear it off, but you can if you want. Unfortunately, of course, that would mean it can’t go through an automatic barrier, but a redesign would mean it could.

Interestingly, I had a through ticket on Eurostar, and the same single sheet of paper counted for Eurostar, Thalys in Belgium, and ICE in Germany. I was expecting difficulty at the Eurostar terminal, as it didn’t have a bar code on, but it was fine – didn’t get any funny looks from staff who’d never seen that design of ticket before.

Some great ideas here, and as the comments say, some issues to be ironed out.

I totally agree about the Adult: ONE, Child: NIL absurdity. I often travel with my wife and children on a family railcard, yet get issued with eight tickets (OUT/RTN x 4). Given that these tickets are only valid when travelling together, it’s a waste of card. You will only ever see Adult: ONE, Child: NIL and vice versa. I was told this was to allow tickets to be used on automatic barriers where the machine allows through one person per ticket, but it’s still a waste.

What’s needed is a proper e-ticketing system, whether that means printing at home or via an app on a phone.

Also, while so much investment is being made into making trains and stations compliant with the DDA regs, nothing appears to be happening with tickets which are often unreadable for the fully sighted.

First off, I agree that the suggested design is a big improvement for passengers.

I’m concerned that the rail companies might not see it as an improvement, though. If passengers currently don’t understand their tickets and consequently need to pay penalty fares or buy their tickets twice, rail companies might see that as a way to make extra money. Even if reducing the extra admin costs resulting from the confusion might more than make up for that, it may be difficult for rail companies to make the comparison and figure that out.

Hear hear. I never know which of the four or five tickets I’m supposed to hand over to the ticket inspector, and the information can easily be included on one ticket. To not do so benefits nobody.

I think this is fantastic and very much needed. I think more information is needed in the ‘route’ section though – in the case above, ‘not via Slough’ is only helpful if you know the train network well (and also potentially confusing – some might ask ‘what if I go on the Paddington line but don’t actually stop at Slough, would that be allowed?’). More information on alternative routes would be very helpful.
Out of interest, how do you get from Bristol TM to London without going through Slough? Do you have to switch down to the SW Trains network and roll into Waterloo?

One more point based on personal experience. It would be helpful to make it clear where the ticket was printed, whether it was at a counter or on a machine used only by the customer (with no staff member to help) and what train company operate the station the ticket was bought from.

This would help in several ways:
If bought by machine, it would help companies/thinktanks know what is unclear about ticketing to customers, based on how often the wrong ticket is bought.
I have been in the situation where I have bought from a station for one operator (LondonMidland) a ticket which required me to change train midway, also changing operator (to Chiltern). On the second train I was then told my ticket was not valid, and it was because London Midland did not know the restrictions of the Chiltern network. All of this information would be helpful in the long run for improvements.

Ian says: “What’s needed is a proper e-ticketing system, whether that means printing at home or via an app on a phone.”

It already exists. I just bought three tickets for travel in Finland. Online through http://www.vr.fi/en/index.html, in English. I can print out a single page with details of all three journeys, including seat reservations, and a barcode for each one. Presumably ticket inspector scans this. Details can be sent to mobile devices too.

Generally completely agree, however I _think_ “AP Slough” on your ticket means “Any reasonable route that passes through Slough”, not “You can’t go through Slough” (for Bristol TM –> London this might mean you can go via Bath/Chippenham, or Bristol Parkway, or via Newbury, but you can’t go via Salisbury or change at Reading for a Waterloo train)

“AP Slough” certainly doesnt make that obvious though, which is rather the point you’re making :-)

One point stands out about your redesigned ticket. You have ‘You can’t go through Slough’. This is 100% INCORRECT. The original ticket is routed AP SLOUGH, in other words ‘Advance Purchase Slough’, meaning that you MUST go through Slough. You actually HAVE bought a ticket that is not an ‘Any Permitted’. The reason for this is so that you don’t change trains at Reading for a service to Waterloo.
Secondly, the original ticket is clearly marked, right at the very top,
VALID ONLY WITH RESERVATIONS and ISSUED AS 2 COUPONS, so it does make it very clear that both are needed.

Thanks for your research and sensible alternative design suggestions.
Let’s hope ATOC are listening…

There may be a case for invoking the Equality Act 2010 asking the rail operators how they justify such poor ticket design which is confusing. Up to 5% of the population are believed to have a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia or dyspraxia. These are counted as disabilities from a legal point of view.

For someone with dyslexia or dyspraxia the ticketing rules are likely to be extra confusing as organisation, reading comprehension and processing of language are all likely to be affected. Your proposed redesign resolves a lot of the issues I’d say were most confusing and disabling.

I think it’s partly deliberate, as it means they make people pay up for extra fares that they didn’t want to buy. It’s all legalised extortion.

Nice to see some larger studios getting involved with this project after the initial post by Daniel Gray at http://www.swisscheeseandbullets.com/journal/train-in-vain.html

Great idea. Its not only regular travellers who get caught out by the stupid design of such tickets. I have frequently seen tourists – Americans, Japanese, etc., totally bewildered when being rudely told off by RPIs because for some obscure reason they have the wrong tickets. The RPIs could do with attending ‘smile and be nice’ workshops too. This is an aspect of rip-off Britain that does the reputation of our tourist industry no good at all. Tourists are regularly getting ripped off for no reason of theirs. And I haven’t even mentioned the Oyster card scams in London.

Great post! There is another issue – a single ticket can include many reservations. Going from Godalming to Darsham for example, you can have stack of 3 or 4 reservation tickets, each with a specific time and reserved seat.

You say that tickets “are designed for ticket inspectors”. Believe me they are not!

I spent 10 years as a conductor and ticket inspector (nowadays I’m a driver – much less hassle!).
Under BR it was understood that the basic ticket is complex and difficult to check rapidly and effectively, which is why BR had so many different colours and designs of ticket blank – they were all intended to let ticket examiners quickly see what sort of ticket they were looking at and therefore what they needed to be looking for.

After privatisation someone, somewhere decided that all those special blanks were pointless and (presumably) cost too much, and that the plain orange blank would be good enough.

The result is that your average ticket examiner now spends three times as long checking each ticket because they first have to figure out what sort of ticket they’re looking at and what they need to be looking for – even if the passenger has given them the correct part(s).

That side of things is a mess.

Onto the ticket itself:
There are a number of issues with your suggested revision.

First, multiple passengers on one ticket is OK as long as there are no automatic gates involved. Where there are gates, by having more than one passenger on a ticket, you’re forcing them to queue at a manned barrier. That’s an unnecessary delay.
(Incidentally, tickets can only hold a very limited of encoded information on the magnetic stripe. That’s one reason the Train Companies are starting to look at using bar codes).

Second, you seem to be perpetuating the idea that a return ticket must have two coupons. Why? Simply by putting a return journey on one coupon, you’ve immediately reduced the amount of card most passengers have by half.

Third, you’ve fixated on tickets with seat reservations. The vast majority of tickets sold for UK rail journeys do not have reservations at all, so although I understand some people get confused, it really is not as huge a problem as you may think.

We long ago suggested that AP tickets should be issued with all reservations shown on a simple piece of A4 paper, but back then the technology didn’t allow it. There’s no reason why that couldn’t be done now, and it would allow much more useful information than would ever fit on any number of credit-card sized coupons.

Fourth, there’s a general assumption that if people are on the wrong train it’s because they don’t understand their ticket. My experience is that people who are quite happy with the concept of “cheaper air ticket = no flexibility, very expensive air ticket – full flexibility” flat refuse to accept it where trains are concerned and, again IMX, a good 75% of those who are on the wrong train with an Advance ticket are well aware that their ticket isn’t valid but are hoping they’ll get away with it, especially if they pretend not to understand the problem. Many of the rest tend to have been delayed by another bit of the railway, so their ticket is still valid. Those who *genuinely* don’t understand are a vanishingly small number, much less than 1%.

Fifth: routes. You say that the fact that you didn’t understand that “AP Slough” meant you had to travel via Slough shows its’ unclear. But you were travelling on an Advance ticket valid only on the train you were booked on; the route is utterly irrelevant, and it’s only shown because the system can’t NOT print it – that ticket is only routed because it specifies which Train Companies get a share of the fare you paid.

Route are only relevant when you’re using a non-Advance ticket (i.e. Off Peak or Anytime) and in the vast majority of cases there is no specified route – just the “Any Permitted”, which is the lawyers way of saying “You can use pretty much any sensible route and few more besides unless we’ve decided you can’t”. Most staff don’t understand Permitted Routes, so the passengers certainly aren’t expected to.

Again, as with seat reservations, experience shows that where routes are specified, they will be ignored when people want to ignore them and complied with the rest of the time, regardless of how they are shown on the ticket.
The old ATB blanks (same size as an airline boarding card) used to have detailed routes shown, but people with a ticket marked “NOT VALID VIA LONDON” would still try to use it via London. Some people are just fiddling beggars; it’s a fact of life.

Finally, information and readability: please remember that a ticket isn’t actually intended for the customer to read – this applies to rail, bus, air and sea tickets alike. It’s designed to give information to the staff. Hence the inclusion of information which the passenger already knows or doesn’t need to know. You may not need to know it; the staff do…

It’s a fact that no credit card sized ticket will ever be acceptably readable to the partially sighted, as it’s almost impossible to fit a decent amount of information at the minimum 12 point print sized which is required for readability (the RNIB can help with that side of things). Your proposed version has print which looks to be as small as about 4pt, and however good the print quality, that will be unreadable to many people. But, as the ticket is for the information of the staff, does it really need to be readable to anybody else?

Turning back to tickets in general, possibly the best basic ticket available today is the ATB blank; it’s large enough to have plenty of information in plain English along with up to 4 trains worth of reservations and room for a bar code (for ticket barriers) – but we discovered back in BR days that people don’t like ATB tickets; they’re too large.
One of the other posters recommends the current German practice of printing everything on a sheet of A4, but DB have told industry colleagues that they’re getting a lot of negative feedback from passengers about them. Again, they’re simply too large.

When it comes to data on tickets, there’s a huge amount of technical specs out there (albeit not publicly available). Remember that the little orange card which serves for your Bristol to London Advance single can also be a 14-day 1st class All Line Rover ticket, a 7-day season, a PlusBus day ticket, an admission ticket to Madam Tussauds, a control ticket for the Holyhead – Dublin ferry, a receipt to be used for an expenses claim, a platform ticket, a shift revenue summary for the ticket machine operator and a thousand other things besides, and that means it’s a lot more complicated than a simple ticket may at first appear.

There’s no easy solution, that’s for sure. Whatever you come up with, someone will complain!

A long post. I hope it’s of interest. :)

Great idea.

Needs some extra thinking for flexible-but-restricted tickets, eg Super-Off-Peak Return. “As advertised” really won’t do as the way of specifying the limitations – but I can’t see that there is any way of giving an explicit definition of what is often quite a complicated set of validity rules on a ticket of current size.

If nothing else, perhaps the ticket could specify “Valid as listed on schedule ABC1234567″ which refers to an A4 sheet which explains the rules that are specific to the ticket purchased, in plain English. This could be printed on request at a staffed ticket office, emailed with the confirmation of an online purchase, downloaded by the passenger, (and perhaps printed-on-demand from a future generation of ticket machines). The nervous passenger could then have something to check as they were about to board their train, and something to refer to in the event of an onboard dispute.

I wonder if they see it as being in their interests to have less-confused customers?

Unless they have changed recently, have you noticed the train companies don’t use the same three-letter month abbreviations as the rest of us? Instead of Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, etc, they use (from memory) things like FBR for February, JLY for July. It’s usually fairly clear what is meant, but unnecessarily different to what seems to be what most people are used to.

I think what needs more clarity is the “off-peak” and “super off-peak” debacle. I noticed at Paddington station that it says on the departure boards what tickets can be used and there are posters around explaining which trains you can get with which tickets but this is totally absent at other stations. I usually end up trying to check on my phone or asking the ticket inspector who is usually quite confused too…

Very nice redesign! Although the sceptic in me says that perhaps the train companies want the confusion, as they can make more profits out of the penalty fares :-)

There’s what MIGHT be an elephant in the room here and that is what happens to the ticketing data after issue. It gets handed off through various systems for analysis and to be split up among the TOCs. I have no idea how those systems work, just that they exist but my guess is they would need modification which could well be expensive.

Then there are the ticket gates, I wonder what data they read from the magnetic stripe and whether that has any effect.

Also there are some journeys that require reservations on more than one train (e.g. Oxford, Reading, Westbury) and your example shows one seat number but 1 adult and 2 children – where are the kids sitting?

The current layout has grown up over many years and could definitely do with someone sitting down with a blank sheet and starting again and you’ve got some good ideas but I’m doubtful whether it will work in it’s present form.

Is the plan to present this to the railways in some way?

Can you remove the A after the seat number? You’d be amazed (or maybe not) at the number of people who turn up in the final coach looking for coach A (there is none on the trains I use).

I think that the A after the seat number is a hangover from the airline ticketing software which I suspect is used for printing the tickets. A dash or blank would cause far less confusion.

Richard

Makes a lot of sense to me Steve. Also, they could use different colours on the top and bottom for off-peak/on-peak or young persons cards/other rail cards, so inspectors can tell the differences more quickly and work more efficiently.

You raise some good points and I agree with the suggestions. However, a few things… If the ticket is for an adult and two children, and it’s for seat 39 then are three people meant to occupy the single seat? Where would railcard information go? Remember that if a ticket is discounted by using a railcard, the railcard must be carried when travelling and with the example, the ticket inspector couldn’t tell whether a railcard needs to be carried or not. There’s no indicator of the method of payment which would be necessary for a refund (cheque/card/cash/warrant are the four I know of). If this ticket wasn’t a ticket valid on the one train, what would the proposed ticket layout be? For example I buy an open return ticket from Bristol TM to London Paddington where I can travel out today and I can return within a month. And finally, there’s usually an indicator on tickets where the journey crosses London to show whether the ticket is valid on London Underground services or not to transfer between terminals. If that’s put in the validity field, for example, then it could get quite long! For example, Bristol TM to Chelmsford could have a validity of “You must travel through Slough. This ticket is valid on London Underground services to cross London.”

Brilliant…. But it won’t work as it is too simple….

The other week I was on a train for which my ticket was valid at departure, but as I had to cross London to get to my destination became invalid. What was worrying was I had double and triple checked the validity of the ticket before I left, and other than the usual ‘cannot leave London before 9:30 am on the return leg’ there was no mention of this other ‘validity’ issue.

For “specific train” tickets, as shown, you don’t actually need to say what the route is, surely?

The other issue is if you’re doing a longer journey, you may have 2 or more reservations for different trains; at that point you probably need more than one card. That said, I still think yours is an improvement.

I’d love to see something that, rather than just saying “off peak only”, actually told you what this meant for this journey. (But given how arcane some of the rules are, again you might need more space!)

Steve – awesome post and thank you for doing this!

I love this post and value the effort you have made. I will be writing my MP to bring it to the attention of the government to the transport regulator to start to look at this. The companies won’t do it themselves.

Thx again.
Mike

Steve,

I think you make some good points and the new ticket design you propose is certainly an improvement. I would however question how you propose to deal with the not-infrequent cases where a seat is reserved for only one part of a journey, or perhaps more importantly where the advanced ‘must use this train’ reservation is only one part of the full journey you’re making. The current system deals with this simply and easily by having one main ticket valid for the full journey and (as many as are required) reservations for the legs that require/have reservations. I fail to see how your ‘one ticket’ approach will deal with this.

Alex

I’ve just returned from Ireland – to get there and back took 8 tickets; in Ireland I travelled from Dublin to Tralee, change at Mallow, and required just one ticket (with reservations) – in England that would have needed six! What’s more, my name was up in lights over my seat – so no arguments!

http://fredpipes.blogspot.com/2011/07/euston-to-heuston-and-beyond.html

A few follow up comments -

- Alan, the months are shown in a non-standard way as a simple anti-fraud measure. It works.

- Alice, “off-peak” and “peak” aren’t fixed times for all journeys on a given route from a given station, which is why they aren’t generally shown; it gets far too complex.
The time barrier flexes by journey so that cheaper off-peak tickets aren’t valid on what are usually the busier trains – although it’s always rather a blunt cut-off, so it doesn’t always work too well.

- Scrabble Helper, it takes far too much effort to gain a relatively small amount of money so, no, they’re not actually deliberately trying to confuse you. Part of the problem is that the ticket and pricing for each company is done by maybe one or two people whoa re each responsible for thousands of individual journeys. It’s hardly surprising they sometimes can’t see the individual trees for the forest!

- Charlotte, the tickets as used come in huge great rolls; they’re not individually fed into the machines. That makes it very difficult (albeit not impossible) to have tickets with different colours on now.

- Nick, you may think your journey was simple, but when you dig down into it, the only simple journey is one from a station to the next station along the line. After that there are combinations of possible breaks of journey, potentials for using different routes and all sorts – and it all makes it complex.

- Stuart, yes, you’re right, you’d need a LOT more space. If, for example, your journey allowed travel through more than one London terminus (say either Liverpool Street or Kings X), you’d end up with a page or more of information, 90% of which just wouldn’t be of interest although is technically relevant.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that the basic rail ticket in the UK is _very_ flexible; you can break your journey more-or-less at will, take different routes and so on. The ticketing rules made available to staff have to cover all the possible combinations of journey for each ticket, even if only 1 person in 1,000 actually uses the ticket that way. And that has to be done for every ticket which can be sold. It means that the entire Ticket and Pricing System is by necessity very complex.

Chris

Thanks for the explanation. I assumed it was a hangover from BR days (I remember my Dad – who worked for BR all his life – talking about it a few decades ago!) and the reason buried in the mists of time. Are you saying it’s to stop people trying to alter the date?

Thanks Ross for all the explanations.

I’ve always wondered about the month abbreviations. I had assumed the system had been programmed by some foreign company who didn’t know the standard abbreviations.

So what’s wrong with the Irish ticket? Two journeys and four reservations on one ticket!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredpipes/5970349224/

Alan, yes, it’s to stop people altering the date or printing up their own blanks – or, rather, it’s too make it more obvious if they do so.

I’ve been reminded today that the Department for Transport’s ITSO Smartcard project for rail (which will see card tickets replaced with smartcard use) isn’t just for season tickets; apparently East Midlands Trains is lead operator for the trial of smartcards for “ordinary” single and return tickets.

If that trial works – and the evidence from the Dutch project where “throwaway” smartcards are used for single journeys or short-period tickets is that they *do* work – then all the discussion about designs for the credit-card size blanks we use here will become irrelevant as they will no longer be used.

I’ve also been reminded that there’s a big project starting which will see many (if not all) tickets sold through the internet being issued as “print at home” in the same way as Eurostar, Germany’s Deutsche Bahn and Switzerland’s SBB issue their internet-purchased tickets. Those tickets are already in circulation here, and they are rather similar to the German tickets Elliot mentions in one of the first comments here.

I exasperatingly keep reading things like “not an easy solution”, “a difficult issue” in relation to this. This is damn simple – one ticket. It doesn’t take a design consultant to come up with this revelation, though I am glad its being addressed at least. The rail companies, from ticket conductors to executives knew about this problem and they did nothing about it, because it makes them extra money and causes distress to the customers they clearly despise. It is parasitic but profitable. The worst thing is they pick on tourists and the vulnerable, and this sickens me. No sense of commitment to customers, no care to be professional. There are great rail staff, but too few. I guess the truly difficult issue will be getting the companies to behave responsibly and force them to stop waiting for consultants to design things they already know how to fix.

Basically tickets, prices and service needs to be sorted out on our rail systems.

Genius. I had this problem this weekend. 2 adult return tickets, we had about 8 pieces of paper, and about 2 minutes to get to the train on the other side of the turnstyle