"Neil Williams" wrote in message

Which is why PFs are a nonsense as they are currently implemented. The
suspicion in the above is left down to the ticket staff, who (according
to recent posts in here) often go down the prosecution route even for
an obvious case of forgetting a season ticket had expired or similar.

I agree that PFs are poorly implemented. My main boeuf is that people keep
referring to them as "fines" and assume that they are a kind of "prosecution
lite". They are simply the opposite of "advance purchase" tickets.

I would be much happier if
a) PFs were renamed PostPay or whatever.
b) This implicit connexion between "not paying yet", "evading" and "penalty"
were broken.
c) Ticket checks were absolute, i.e that there was a 100% chance of having
your ticket checked at least once per journey, and in such a way that there
was a definite definition of "stealing from the railway" and a definite way
of telling whether a prosecution was appropriate. (I.e. if you've crossed
outside
a line-in-the-sand and have made no *attempt* to pay, then that is an
automatic
arrest)

Or we could go down the route of making it a legal requirement to prepay for
your whole journey. This would require all ticket offices everywhere to be
able
to issue every combination of ticket to/from/via/date/time and for unmanned
stations
to be abolished.




--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com