Top 10 Oyster Overcharging Stations

By · February 26, 2011 at 15:00 pm · 13 Comments · Latest News · Report an error ·

The news that Oyster users are being overcharged at stations across the underground network won’t come as a surprise to many of us though perhaps the scale of it might do. It was revealed yesterday that in 2010, TfL netted a whopping £61.8m from passengers due to broken or open barriers and cards not read or swiped properly.

We reported back in January that the maximum fare was going up and a lack of barriers at some stations meant passengers were being overcharged, but there’s another problem: when stations become overcrowded (as they frequently do during rush hour), staff open the barriers and use the autocomplete system which touches travellers out of the system automatically. Sensors pick up cards going through the barriers but to avoid a maximum fare the user must touch in again at the same station within three days. This is fine if it’s a station you use frequently, but not quite so convenient if it isn’t.

The DLR recently made the news for the same reason and features heavily in the complete list of overcharging stations with a contribution of £3.2m to that £61m total. Caroline Pidgeon of the London Assembly Transport Committee calls the charges ‘unacceptable’ and said; ‘There is something very seriously wrong when each and every week of the year Londoners are ripped off by more than £1m.’

TfL say that maximum fares are not overcharges, which is debatable since they appear to be occurring at least partly as a result of a failure in TfL’s Oyster system. The Shepherd’s Bush blog points out that many users are not aware they’ve been overcharged but urges them to double check every journey.

So without further ado, here are the top 10 stations overcharging Oyster users and the amount overcharged:

  1. Waterloo National Rail – £2,452,000
  2. London Bridge National Rail – £2,300,000
  3. Liverpool Street National Rail – £1,615,000
  4. Bank London Underground – £1,339,000
  5. King’s Cross London Underground – £1,073,000
  6. Victoria London Underground – £982,000
  7. Stratford – £877,000
  8. Wimbledon – £825,000
  9. Oxford Circus London Underground – £862,000
  10. Liverpool Street London Underground – £670,000

Photo by Luke O’Regan

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Report an error

  • http://twitter.com/keot Keot

    I am regularly overcharged when travelling from Clapham Junction to Liverpool Street via Waterloo. The Oyster card system cannot cope with the northbound journey, but can cope with the southbound one.

    I’ve noticed that the online journey history does not show incomplete journeys, however if you request a statement from TfL online you receive a version showing you such problems.

    No response from TfL from their online system, so I guess I’ll have to wait on the phone. Shame I can no longer go to a ticket desk since they’re all closed…

  • http://twitter.com/diamondgeezer diamond geezer

    Eight of those stations aren’t a surprise, because they’re the busiest tube/rail stations in London. You’d expect busier stations to have higher rates of overcharging.
    The two exceptions are Stratford (which is a very complex interchange) and Wimbledon (which has a special touch-in rule for tram passengers that applies only here, and which thousands of people must forget).

  • Beth Torr

    I’d be interested to know if the overcharging rates went up at Stratford after they removed the barriers to the Jubilee Line platforms. When coming off national rail there, you’d have to touch in to enter the tube network but that’s not the case now and there’s only a couple of readers off to the side of the concourse.

  • Sarah

    Good luck getting your money back at the ticket desk, because they won’t do that any more. I was overcharged at Waterloo once, going to Liverpool St. I touched in at Waterloo, but it didn’t register. The ticket desk lady wouldn’t believe me and said I had to call the number on my Oyster card. Well it was after 5 so I couldn’t. I had no money to get home AND it was my birthday. Thanks TFL for a really shitty birthday.

  • http://twitter.com/ZenPyramid ZenPyramid

    …i don’t commute, i’m an occasional user of TfL, and it’s OBVIOUS how much money they take hand over foot. I’ll set of with twelve pounds on the card one day, two weeks later, next time i use the card, it’s only got a quid on it! Oysters the easiest way to fleece the general public, and this figure of ‘£68m’ doesn’t even come close when you factor in the awesome charge of £5 for the card (£5! Wassit, gold card?), and the fact that if you don’t wanna be tracked on some database you have to be anonymous, so you lose the card, you lose the money. And the fact you’re required to keep any and all receipts if you’re gonna have any chance of getting the money back anyway! Typical ‘easy to pay in, impossible to hold to account’ plutocratic bureaucracy that makes money for all the wrong sort of people….

    • lenty

      £5 charge is mostly because of the free journey you get going into negative money. It’s a feature of the card and one that has saved my bacon on more than one night out. If they gave them out for less than the charge of a journey you could, if you were cheap and could be bothered, consistently skip paying fares.

      • http://twitter.com/ZenPyramid ZenPyramid

        …okay, but that’s not how emergency credit on a key meter works, because it’s blatantly unfair to charge people for a service they may never use. I certainly haven’t. When looking at the big picture, millions of cards that cost nothing, but cost £5 at point of service, is a big earner for TfL when one realises that a vast majority (educated guess work here) of the cards that are mislaid are not lost because they have gone a quid or two into the red (still forcing consumer to effectively pay £4 to £3 for the privilege of a new card) but because they are genuinely lost, with money on an’ all! In fact, i doubt anyone DELIBERATELY runs exactly five pounds worth of debit onto the card before losing it. I imagine it’s actually impossible to hit exactly minus £5, so the consumer is ALWAYS going to lose money when they lose the card. Period.
        ~
        What would be nice would be a system that treats commuters less like common criminals who are trying to constantly rip the transport system off, but like human beings, who actually will do the right thing if you make it easy and fair for them, and may occasionally lose a stupid piece of plastic and thus can be granted the occasional clemency. How do we stop the persistent offenders? Well, on the whole the staff in the stations know what they’re doing, and are quite capable of making such ‘executive’ decisions without being straight jacketed by dogma. And the persistant evaders don’t pay for the system anyway, so who cares!? The vast number of honest hard working comuters do, and they’re the ones who are treated like naughty cattle. Pathetic.
        ~
        How’s about a little respect, eh TfL?
        ~
        TfL?
        ~
        *silence
        ~
        …ah well, no surprise there, eh…?

  • eastender99

    In addition to Oyster errors, when there are problems/delays on a tube line people resort to a workaround that may involve buses or overground. In that case you pay more – for 2 or more separate journeys rather than one – AND suffer delays! Multiply by several thousand travellers and you a see a ££££££ big disincentive to make the tubes more reliable!

  • eastender99

    In addition to Oyster errors, when there are problems/delays on a tube line people resort to a workaround that may involve buses or overground. In that case you pay more – for 2 or more separate journeys rather than one – AND suffer delays! Multiply by several thousand travellers and you a see a ££££££ big disincentive to make the tubes more reliable!

  • http://www.shannonagains.com Shannon

    Don’t forget about the ridiculous Oyster Extenstion Permit – I have to get one every time I travel into or out of zone 1 to avoid penalties, which often means standing in a queue to get soemthing that’s free anyway. I wonder how many Londoners are even aware of it!?

  • Peter Hicks

    “Sensors pick up cards going through the barriers” – can you please cite your source for this statement, as it doesn’t seem right that Oyster cards can be read from afar.

  • Peter Hicks

    “Sensors pick up cards going through the barriers” – can you please cite your source for this statement, as it doesn’t seem right that Oyster cards can be read from afar.

  • Beth_torr

    Hi Peter, I originally got this from the BBC but it was reported by a number of other sources too.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/mindthegap/2011/02/osyter_blog.html?postid=106759273

←
→