The tube was seriously disrupted in northwest London yesterday morning when a signal failure at Wembley Park caused line closures and serious delays. And the advice which popped up is the advice which often pops up in such a situation, which is that tickets were being accepted on alternative services. And I thought, how does that work then?
Most people travelling on the Jubilee line, indeed the vast majority, aren't carrying tickets. They have contactless cards, contactless devices and Oyster cards but not actual paper tickets. So how does accepting tickets on alternative services help anyone?
If you're in Stanmore when the Jubilee line goes down you don't have a ticket, you have a Pay As You Go device. It's going to be accepted on alternative services no matter what because that's how Pay As You Go works, and it'll charge you the going rate for whatever alternative journey you choose to make. The message that seven alternative services are accepting tickets is of no practical financial use.
It is possible to buy a paper ticket from Stanmore but you wouldn't, it costs £1.60 more at peak times and twice as much off peak. You could then wave that paper ticket on a bus and ride to Edgware to travel in from there but you wouldn't, you'd use the same PAYG device all the way through.
The list of alternative ticket-accepting services is impressive, from buses to the Overground to three National Rail operators. The Jubilee line spans the capital so when it fails you need a lot of alternative ways to go. But how do they all suddenly recognise that you were intending to travel on the Jubilee line and now you're travelling with them, and then not charge you any extra for it?
The Metropolitan line was similarly messed up yesterday and this time tickets were accepted on Chiltern which runs in parallel. But again who's actually got a ticket, and even if you do choose to ride into Marylebone rather than Baker Street the fares are identical, so what's the point in telling us?
The Elizabeth line also went kaput in west London yesterday, as it has a repeated tendency to do, with a track fault at Southall causing severe delays west of Paddington. This time it's easier to believe some people might have tickets, what with longer distances to travel, but still not many in the grand scheme of things.
If you were in Slough it's nice to know you could have taken GWR into Paddington instead, although it turns out GWR services were also disrupted so it might not have helped. If you were in Ealing you could have crammed onto the Central line instead, as you always could, and travellers at Heathrow still had the Piccadilly line. I note tickets were not accepted on the Heathrow Express, but they've always been greedier than most.
So look, I'm sure that when this kind of disruption happens certain protocols are applied and tickets are accepted on alternative services. But why are they telling us this, because it applies to almost nobody yet is given great priority in the messaging?
My theories: a) it's important to pass this information on to people with tickets, so they do. b) some magic money-saving algorithm kicks in behind the scenes for PAYG users. c) this is legacy advice, once relevant, that nobody's ever got round to changing.
Alternatively they might do it as a reminder to passengers of possible alternative methods of travel. If the Jubilee line's buggered and tickets are accepted on London Buses, London Underground, Elizabeth line, DLR, C2C, Southeastern and Thameslink, you might suddenly go "oooh, I guess I could get a bus and then Thameslink into work", which you might not realise otherwise.
I guess there must be a good reason for announcing that "tickets are being accepted on alternative services". I just don't know what it is.
