For the past 3 years I’ve had the dubious pleasure of commuting via Southern Rail.
If you scroll back a year or so in my Twitter feed you’ll notice it’s about 95% rants directed at @SouthernRailUK. I have, however, resigned myself to the fact that nothing I can do is going to change their shoddy service and I’ve largely stopped venting my almost daily dismay at how they can possibly get away with running such an appalling ‘service’.
But this Saturday I was compelled to tweet them, not this time about their train service but about their ticket machines.
If there’s one thing that irritates me more than rail delays it’s bad design and user experience. The first is certainly not my area of expertise, but the second being a reasonably large element of my job it seems perhaps I can help Southern out a little.
So that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m going to record my progress right here, and I’m not going to stop until the problem is fixed dammit!
It’s no secret that UK train ticketing is a complex subject. Last month is was announced that a trial will be running from May to simplify the 16 million (yes, MILLION) possible routes and fares and this seems to be dealing with the same problems acknowledged by the government in 2011.
The most recent trial is attempting to tackle the frankly bonkers pricing system that means a single ticket direct from A to C passing through B can be significantly more expensive than two singles, one A to B and one B to C. These are often long-distance journeys and the quirk is known as Split Ticketing
A nation-wide solution to that problem seems years away, but the one I’d like to tackle is more localised and, I think, more achievable.