Phil Linnecor, Director at Acorel, discusses the business’s methods to safeguard against fare dodging.
As people find ways of reducing their cost of living, Acorel’s fare evasion solutions ensure those savings do not include avoiding paying for travel.
In a week when butter hits £10/kg and retailers are forced to add security tags to cheese, people are looking for easier solutions to save money. But that’s no excuse to cut corners at the expense of transport operators.
Fare dodgers will say public transport is too expensive, and transport operators will tell you that they are still trying to recover their passenger numbers to pre-COVID values. Although the truth is that if a larger number of passengers decide to take a free ride, and operators still have to cover their costs, this means the ticket prices of the paying passengers has to increase to cover the losses created by passengers trying to save a little money and avoiding paying for their travel. In other words, it’s just simple mathematics; fare evasion goes up 10%, so ticket prices go up 10% in order to balance the payments.
- In 2015, the Court of Auditors estimated that fare evasion in public transport represented an average of 5% of commercial revenue, i.e. around €500 million.
- In its 2020 case study, Transdev estimates the fare evasion rate on its network at 12.3%, i.e. around 40 million euros in losses.
- According to Transfare’s June 16, 2020 article “Fare evasion impact”, Washington DC is estimated to have lost $40 million (€33.6 million) on its bus and metro system in 2019. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) lost $215 million (€181 million)
All these figures are low estimates since some transport operators have difficulties to get the real data on the number of people who evade the fare. Although rates of exceeding 20% fare evasion on some networks is what they are actually experiencing.
This is where the automatic counting of people comes into play. Indeed, the cross-referencing of data from the precision counting system with that from the ticketing system makes it possible to obtain the real fare evasion rate and therefore factual figures. The operator can then exploit this fare evasion data at different levels: spatio-temporal mapping, historical and predictive data, real-time analysis, targeting of the fare evasion peak, planning of control actions, etc.
This type of solution represents a real return on investment. Indeed, in addition to the financial losses linked to fare evasion, resources are also mobilised (ticket inspectors, police officers, installation of gates, etc.). All this represents a significant cost for transport operators. A transport network equipped with an automatic counting system will be able to optimise actions linked to the fight against fare evasion. Finally, in order to naturally reduce the economic impact, it is essential to put in place an efficient strategy to reduce the fare evasion rate.
Transport operators around the world are already benefiting from Acorel’s solutions and are able to pass cost savings onto the paying passengers.
Acorel’s solutions go beyond fare evasion, and our solutions can help you create cost savings in your business and improve the passenger experience, whilst improving your bank balance.
