RavenGarcia.com has officially declared war on Transport For London.

It’s a rainy Friday evening. Dean and myself have just managed to make it from the LSE student bar to Holborn tube station without getting drenched. We now need to take a short journey (4 stops) on the Northbound Piccadilly line to get to Holloway Road where we will again brave the rains and attempt to reach the Big Red bar and have a drink with Will who is in town for his birthday.

Dean has some pre-pay on his oyster card and strolls through the barriers with ease. I, however, am on a budget. As a rule, I tend to use buses rather than the tube whenever I can but tonight is one of those occasions where the tube becomes a necessity as we are looking to get to Big Red quickly so we can have a good few drinks with Will before he gets the last train back to Bexley. I go up to the counter to buy a ticket.

There are two people in front of me in the queue; an irate Irish guy who has some discrepancy regarding his oyster, and a young German chap in front of me. I listen in to the Irish fellow’s discussion with the ticket officer. Apparently he touched out on his last journey but the system didn’t recognise it and now he has been hit with a penalty fare. I look through the window at the ticket officer. He is sticking to his guns (Well, TFL’s rulebook anyway) and instantly I know that the poor Irish fellow is going to get nowhere with him. I have sympathy for the Irishman. After all, the oyster card system can be confusing if you’re not from London. During the commotion the German fellow walks away, shaking his head in disbelief and probably wondering why the transport system can’t run as efficiently as the ones back in Deutschland. I look over to Dean who is waiting patiently on the other side of the barriers.

The Irish guy is then handed a card with a phone number he has to call to maybe get his money back, but not before being put on hold for about twenty minutes which translates to a phone bill exceeding the amount of the original penalty fare. I know, I’ve been down that road. You wait patiently on hold for such a length of time that your ear starts to get hot and you have to change sides, which you do quickly in case they choose that precise two-second window in which to answer the phone. Frantically you scramble about and put the phone to your other, cooler ear and to your relief you hear the soothing sound of the M-People on the hold music. For the fifteenth fime so far on this call. The song just plays on a loop, with the odd recorded message thrown in about your call being in a queue. Although your call never seems to be “Moving On Up” in that queue.

And that’s another thing, why is it always the M-People?? No matter which company you phone, it is always the M-People that plays when they put you on hold. I reckon they signed some deal with the phone companies when they realised they couldn’t sell their albums for love nor money. And it’s always just one song on a loop. Surely they know that the average time spent on hold is a lot more than the 4-minute, 12-second duration of “Search For The Hero”. Would it have killed them to put an amount of music on that is closer to the average time one spends listening to it? (Although the only suitable song that springs to mind length-wise is the live version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird”.)

But enough about the musical choices of big corporations. So the Irish guy, not satisfied at being pawned off with a telephone number, takes his complaint to the other two ticket hall staff standing a few feet away from Dean. Unlike the jobsworth behind the safety of the glass, these two actually sympathise with him and let him through the barriers. The Irish guy even makes a joke about it and they all laugh before he goes on his way. Sorted. That’s the way it should be done.

Now it is my turn in front of the glass window.

“Can you tell me how much to Holloway Road please” I start off with. “With an oyster” I quickly add, to avoid being charged the full rate that they put on to encourage force you into having an oyster card.
“One Eighty” comes the reply. £1.80 isn’t too bad although I’m sure it only used to be about a quid.

“Okay then, can I get that?” I ask. He fiddles around with something and mutters something about it costing five pounds. I cannot hear him properly because not only is there a piece of thick glass obstructing the space between us, he has also chosen to mumble most of his sentence in a tone that only dogs can hear. I (politely) ask him to repeat what he’s just said.
“MINIMUM FIVE POUND” he bellows, and motions to a sticker stuck in the corner of his window. The sticker elaborates on the guy’s inconclusive explanation. Apparently back in February TFL introduced a new rule whereby customers can only top up by 5 quid or more at the office. The explanation it gives is that it is apparently intended to shorten queues in the ticketing halls.

Bollocks.

And here’s why:

1. Customers may have less than £5.00 on them. The machines still let you top up by smaller amounts, but this means longer queues for the machines (Which are also located in the ticketing halls).

2. Customers may be on a budget, like me, and simply not want to put more on than we need. Call me tight if you like, but I want to put the exact amount that I need for the journey. In my case, £1.80 off of a fiver leaves £3.20 which I’d much rather spend on a nice pint of cider rather than send to oyster limbo until the next time I have to use the dreaded underground. And if you ever find yourself with exactly £5.00, then the ticket machines will not give change for a fiver and instead put it all on to your oyster. You’ll then have to leave the station to find somewhere that will give you change (the ticket offices themselves are not allowed to, their systems have been tinkered with so that they are unable to put less than a fiver on).

3. Customers may not know how much they need to put on. If you happen to miscalculate the price of a journey this causes more problems (Calculating the price of a journey can be difficult, it varies not only on which zones you travel from or to but also on the time of travel and whether your route crosses Zone 1 or not). Put less on your oyster than you need for your journey and you’ll find yourself with a minus balance on your oyster card. But you don’t find out about this when it actually happens, no, that would be too easy. You find out about it the next time you go to top up your oyster card and you find you have “-0.80″ which must be restored before you can start using your oyster again.

This could be avoided with better signage, as there is very little signage near the machines themselves and the automated system has no option for simply selecting the station from a list and then adding the required amount of pre-pay to your card automatically (instead, most of the choices seem designed to irritate you into putting on a fiver or more). I for one find it easier to just queue up at the window, ask how much I need to put on to get where I’m going, then go and queue up again to use the machine and add exactly that amount. Therefore I have to queue up on two separate occasions, creating more queues.

It seems to me that TFL just want you to put a fiver or more on, regardless of how much you need, then just forget about it. It’s like they recieve some sort of bonus for every 100 or so people who put £5.00 on in one go. It also seems to me that they are weeding out the poorer people (something they are already doing by putting up their ticket prices at every conceivable opportunity). I’m not the only one who opposes this either; RMT union have this to say about it on their website (I particularly like their suggestion of changing “Pay as you go” to “Pay in bigger chunks before you go”).

S.O.S. – Staff Our Stations

RMT also believe that these measures have been brought in simply to take custom away from the ticket offices so as to justify staff cuts in the near future. TFL responded by saying that “Nowhere that has a ticket office will lose it”. What they didn’t say is that the offices will only be manned for 1 hour a day- or when staff are not doing sats, gateline duty or manning other stations, as I found out from a friend who works for TFL. So unfortunately, cuts look likely. But RMT oppose this also, and you can find out more about it by clicking here:

So the outcome of it was: I had to queue up to find out how much I needed to put on. Then after queuing for the machine I realised I didn’t have any change. Back to the window which luckily was free, however the guy wouldn’t change a tenner for me, claiming “his system did not allow it”. So I had to leave the station, go next door to a newsagents and buy some tic-tacs in order to get change from a tenner, come back into the station and queue up again to finally put £1.80 onto my oyster and join Dean who by this time was losing the will to live, and I eventully made it over to Big Red. Annoyed, but with minty breath.

Johnson Must Go

This is just one example of a long list of grievances I have with TFL’s regime, headed up by one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

You just know somebody’s a twat with a name like that.

I’m ashamed to say I voted for this guy. To this day he’s the only person I’ve ever voted for in any election (with the exception of class president at school in which I voted for Ben Seamans, but that did not count as I ran in that election myself and won it).

One of the first things Boris did was ban people from drinking alcohol on public transport. I can sort of see his reasoning for this, though I remember seeing Boris himself on Room 101 in which he put the smoking ban in to the aforementioned room. So drinking alcohol – something that directly affects only the user’s health – is worse than smoking which harms anyone within close proximity?

I don’t mind so much that he banned drinking though because I know it was designed to crack down on the antisocial aspect of public drinking – violence, intimidation and people vomiting or relieving themselves on public transport – all of that should stop. I love a drink myself and was mildly annoyed that I felt I was being penalised for the behaviour of others, but on the whole I don’t mind so much.              I still sneak the odd can onto a bus if I feel like it. Nobody says anything.
But what annoyed me about the drinking ban was the last night before it came into effect I went on the Circle Line party with the boys from the Hayfield and had one of the best nights out ever. Boris, if you’re going to ban drinking on the tube then at least allow us one night every year where we can relive the magic of the Circle Line party. In fact, I reckon people would travel in from outside of London especially for it, thus making an event of it and bringing more money in. If you did that it would restore that tiny bit of respect I once had for you. I’d even do something for you in return – such as resist the urge to knock you off of your bike if I ever happened to spot you cycling round Bethnal.

The ‘Boris Bikes’

On the plus side, he has recently introduced the new Barclays Cycle Hire thing (I like to call them the ‘Boris Bikes’) which are a brilliant idea. As well as being eco-friendly, the cost is only £1.00 which is an absolute bargain. I’ve got four of them chained up outside.

So, RavenGarcia.com is at war with TFL. And we’ll fight them on the platforms, we’ll fight them on the escalators, and we’ll stand in defiance to this shambles of a regime by proudly removing the chips from our oysters, taking cans of booze onto the tube in brown paper bags, and even coughing on buses without putting our hands over our mouths.

Please leave comments below to show your support. Also, I have posted this article on my Facebook page too, so click ‘like’ on there and I’ll be your friend and give you candy*.

*I may or may not give you candy.