Money Back Guarantee
Ask the locals in London for the nearest subway and you’ll be pointed somewhere you didn’t want to go: to a pedestrian underpass, forbidding and barren, a walk through which is likely to stir one, irrepressible thought: that someone very bad is waiting for you at the other end.
What you really want, of course, is London’s tube or underground, a considerably better-attended venue that delivers the transport you thought you were asking for. Native New Yorkers like me will naturally liken the tube to their home town’s storied system, and, in some respects, the latter indeed tops the former.
The London tube falls about 5 hours a day short of New York’s 24/7 ubiquity, calling it a night at about 12 am, and its cars are in fact decidedly scruffier than the Apple’s, all but recast into a lending library for that day’s free Metro newspaper discards. Air-conditioning is a non-starter on the tube, and while the London system website (tfl.gov.uk) sports a cool Mapquest-like tube destination finder, its directions often ask me to start my journey from places I’ve never heard of. But the tube owns one mighty advantage the New York system can’t touch: if your train ride takes 15 minutes longer than it’s supposed to, you get your money back.
That incredible factoid is, well, credible. Supply the authorities with some identifying information and a passably accurate recollection about the place and time of the delay, and a reimbursement voucher heads your way in a week or two. I have been compensated twice so far for tube trips gone wrong, and when my stepdaughter was made to take to the buses after her line underwent serious problems a few years ago, she, and lots of other Londoners, were paid back for every day of their above-ground detours.
And the voucher is accompanied by a mea culpa that, for New Yorkers, seems unimaginably contrite:
London Underground is doing all it can to improve the quality of the service it provides, and I very much regret that we let you down on this occasion…I attach below a voucher to the value of your single journey. It is valid for 13 months and can be used as full or part payment for any ticket purchased at a London Underground station.
Once one overcomes the disbelief that attends such official acts of kindness, the obvious question begins to loom: could the selfsame fare pay-back system be brought to New York’s subways, or any other American transit system, for that matter? I emailed that very surmise to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, a response from which bobbed up in my inbox the next day. A representative explained:
It is not New York City Transit’s policy to reimburse a customer for adverse travel conditions due to unexpected delays in service. While we regret the inconvenience, this policy exists to protect our revenue and minimize the opportunity for fraud…
Of course my correspondent has a point. What, after all, prevents scam-minded Londoners from imagining a delay, or more plausibly, alerting themselves to the news of an actual tie-up and insisting that, they too were on the 10:46 out of Tooting Bec (they really have station names like that), the one that languished beneath the Thames for an hour?
The answer to that near-rhetorical question is sealed in a chip implanted in the system’s Oyster card, a protean stub of plastic that, in addition to affording entrée into the tubes, collects a history of the bus and tube journeys amassed by its owner. Graze the Oyster against a tube stop scanner and a diary of the rider’s trips unfurls onscreen, with all the wheres and whens duly remembered. It’s rather eerie, and perhaps born of deeper security concerns, but these mini-archives enable system watchdogs to cross-check their reports of delays against actual passenger whereabouts. And by simply requiring claimants to post their Oyster card number on refund applications - submitted easily online - the system stops a good many of the fraudsters in their tracks, as it were. (And consider the new Oyster incentive - top up, or refill, your card on the Transit for London website and you get to download 5 free iTunes selections. I’m making my list even as we speak.)
Is there, then, any good reason why the London precedent couldn’t be transposed to American transit systems? The technology is there, and the example has been set. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has already folded London’s auto congestion charge idea into his budget strategy; why couldn’t he, and mayors of other cities, imitate London’s fare-back beneficence as well? Mass transit, is, after all, nothing if not a time-sensitive enterprise - and if London is prepared to take the hit for its tardy trains, why should American systems recuse themselves from reprisal?
Abbot Katz is a New Yorker currently living in London.