Paul Weaver wrote:
Richard M Willis wrote:
Why does routine payment of a PF constitute evidence for prosecution ?
There's no law against deliberately paying a PF and doing so every journey.

Indeed, you might decide that you usually get a seat in standard class,
therfore have a standard ticket. Then one day there are no seats
available, so you sit in first class and penalty-upgrade on train, as
over the year it's cheaper than a first season, as you dont need it
very often, but dont know in advance when you do.

To constitute evidence, they'd have to observer the persun paying a
PF "every so often", and then having covert cameras (with NO RPIs checking
tickets), to prove that the persun was attempting to pay ONLY WHEN
CHALLENGED.

If there is no one to buy the ticket (at whatever fare) from on the
train, or your end station, what should you do?


Penalty fares are not applicable if there is no opportunity to pay in
advance. If someone was routinely paying penalty fares, they must have
been applicable*, and therefore he must have had the opportunity.

This is the routine behaviour that I am talking about, ie the not
paying at the ticket office. The authorities would reasonably question
the likelihood of someone willingly paying a PF every day when there
was an opportunity to pay less at the ticket office, unless they "got
away with it" often enough to make it cheaper overall.


*Actually this isn't quite true. The best chance of disputing a
penalty fare is on the grounds that it was issued incorrectly. Given
the rules about signage and so on, one would probably find that a large
proportion of them were.