Oliver Coppard, the Mayor of South Yorkshire, recently claimed that South Yorkshire Supertram are losing £1,700 a week because of fare dodging, although the SYMCA have confirmed that this isn’t all deliberate with some down to the fact that conductors are unable to sell tickets to everyone on board busy trams.
The Mayor made the claims during a local radio phone-in and this amounts to approximately 1% of all journeys made on the network.
However, the SYMCA have said that the number of people deliberately avoiding paying fares is much smaller with just 0.2% of those travelling on board doing so. This is thought to be one of the lowest levels of fare avoidance in the UK. New handheld ticket machines used by conductors now make it easier to track fare dodging according to SYMCA.
Do the people at SYMCA think about what they write before they send out a press release, or do they just press send and hope for the best?
How on earth can an electronic ticket machine track fare dodgers when by dodging the fare they haven’t interacted with the conductor and haven’t been issued a ticket? And if they’re worried about losing £1700 per week on fare dodgers,perhaps they’d like to explain why it’s cost millions to build one tram stop or why they had a double decker bus repainted twice less than a month?