Transport for London (TfL) has announced that it’s expanding its investigations team to focus on persistent fare evaders across the public transport network.

Although London’s fare evasion rate, at less than 3.5%, is low by international public transport standards, it still costs around £130 million per year, and TfL has set a target of cutting the rate to below 1.5% by 2030.

To reduce the numbers, TfL says it is focusing on identifying and targeting the most persistent and high-impact offenders. These are not just the ones who cost the most, as their often brazen behaviour at ticket barriers is often cited as an example of TfL not caring about fare evasion.

It’s actually company policy not to stop gate pushers, as the risk of violence is not worth it, and if when it can sometimes take several trained police officers to restrain a fare evader, it seems odd that online so-called experts loudly call for solitary employees standing by the gateline to stop the fare evader all by themselves.

TfL says that as well as creating an intimidating atmosphere for staff and customers, gate pushers increases risk of work-related violence and aggression for customer-facing teams. In response, TfL is increasing the number of accredited enforcement officers on its network who can refuse entry and remove people from stations, and deploying them to locations with high prevalence of people pushing through gates. TfL is also working to improve wide-aisle gates, which are the main access point for chronic offenders.

For safety reasons, gates need to be able to be pushed open, but TfL was recently trialling changes to gates at a couple of stations to see if that can reduce gate pushers without affecting safety.

TfL’s investigations team will also take an intelligence-led approach based on a mix of ticketing and journey data, passenger information, and CCTV to identify fare evaders responsible for the greatest revenue loss. By analysing travel patterns, the team will focus on those who repeatedly evade fares, ensuring they are caught and held accountable.

This approach has seen success on London Underground, where more than £400,000 was awarded to TfL by the courts last year following the prosecution of 360 prolific fare evaders.

One major area of focus for TfL’s enforcement teams is contactless payment card fare evasion. In one recent case, an individual used a contactless payment card to evade paying the correct fare across 202 journeys. After investigation, the individual was ordered to pay £1,472 in fines, one of the thousands who are caught and prosecuted each year, resulting in financial penalties and criminal convictions.

Focusing on the persistent offenders would seem to be supported by a 2016 review of fare evasion in Australia, which found that two-thirds of revenue losses came from a very small percentage of regular fare evaders, and of the rest, most were often accidental failures rather than deliberate attempts to avoid paying.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “Fare evasion is a criminal offence which deprives TfL of thousands of pounds of vital revenue every year that could be reinvested in London’s transport network.

“That’s why we’re expanding our team of professional investigators to cover the whole network and investing in the latest technology to target the worst offenders. It sends a clear message: fare evasion will not be tolerated, and we will hold those who do it to account.

“The team is supporting more than 500 uniformed TfL officers across the network who are already going after fare evaders and helping to keep the public safe. The latest data shows that TfL’s efforts to reduce fare evasion on the network is working, but there is more to do. I’m determined to do all I can to support the vital work TfL is doing to ensure these vital funds are reinvested into improving transport services for Londoners.”

A 2017 comparison of fare evasion in selected cities

Source: Fare evasion in public transport: A time series approach – Transportation Research Part A Policy and Practice · June 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2017.04.0