On a recent visit to The Smoke, I noticed that I was able to ride on the Docklands Light Railway without traversing any automated barriers - there was a yellow pad for me to present my Oyster card at each end of the journey, but at no point would I have been impeded by not having a ticket.
So how are fares enforced for journeys that begin and end on the DLR, or indeed for any where on the Tube/overground where the end-to-end trip doesn’t include a barrier? Random ticket inspections wouldn’t work, as the Oyster card is just a piece of plastic. Are there ticket enforcement officials doing spot checks with handheld devices that check if you’ve ‘touched your Oyster’ at the start of the journey?
Yes there are, and sometimes you’ll find ticket inspectors waiting in packs at the exit of stations with handheld scanners. On other occassions a pair of inspectors will come round the train. If you’re caught travelling illegally it’s a £20 on the spot fine I think.
Thanks for that - I thought there must be something other than honesty in the equation…
Yep, quite a lot of them going from carriage to carriage. The handheld scanners work fine on oystercards.
Not many tube stations are barrier-free now, but quite a few train stations are. One other deterrent is that if you scan in but not out, the system assumes you’ve travelled right out to zone 6 and charges you for that, so not scanning out could cost you money.
I find the placement of Oyster readers on the DLR extremely irritating - they’re often hidden behind pillars or in similarly inaccessible places. If you don’t consciously go looking for one, you often miss it, and then you forget to touch out, and get charged £4. The cynic in me wonders whether this hiding was intentional policy.