Fare Evasion

Fare evasion on London’s bendy buses is in the news again. Reported in the local London media last week, this follows claims in May by at least one senior London politician that fares evasion in the capital is “out of control” on articulated bus routes.

It seems self-evident that, with bus services, whatever the fares collection system, someone will try to evade it. The problem’s as old as Adam – over-riding, unticketed travel and passing off as younger (or now perhaps older) than you are. Yet, a passenger who travels habitually without payment can be accused of fraud.

Why do people dodge fares when they probably wouldn’t dream of stealing a Mars bar, purse or anything else for that matter? One reason is that evasion is in protest at something – usually perceived high fares or poor service. By far the most important, however, is pure opportunism.

In London, articulated buses present too much of a temptation for some people. Off bus ticketing doesn’t always make it easy to pay for your journey, even when it’s cheaper than buying on bus. Make it difficult to buy a ticket on the one hand and make it easy to board an artic without detection on the other and, for a small but significant minority, temptation turns to transgression. Oyster cards, as good as they are, cannot readily solve determined fraud.

Such fraud extends both beyond articulated buses and beyond London. Said a 20-year-old Birmingham student, “Fare evasion and fraud is fairly common, mostly with people using out-of-date daysavers and bus passes or paying child fares.” She’s coming at this from a young person’s perspective - juvenile delinquency, a term now unfashionable.

It’s also a matter of risk versus reward. In Melbourne, it seems that you have a 1:590 chance of being caught. While TfL intends to strengthen its inspectorate by about 15 per cent, detection rates remain low and fraud remains "worthwhile". And you need three inspectors per artic if you are going to be determined. And without police backing, an inspector is effectively powerless if the miscreant elects to leave the bus without paying a penalty fare.

There is, of course, another category of evader. Research on the New York subway found that one in seven arrested by NYPD for subway fare evasion were wanted for another crime. This is termed criminal “self-selection”. NYPD’s figure seems unbelievably high but it suggests that, in London as elsewhere, there may yet be a correlation between anti-social behaviour and evasion that the police could do well to understand. After all, Citaro route 25 (Ilford-Oxford Circus) is said to be London’s most dangerous as well as its most fraudulent, with the highest number of emergency calls made by drivers.

In all this, though, TfL should not panic. It needs to weigh up the economies of fewer staff and fewer (higher maintenance) crew-operated vehicles, plus swift-loading passenger time benefits against an increase in fraud.