tsr
Established Member
Sutton needs vastly longer hours for someone to sell tickets. At present I can tell you from experience that during the evening, which is when the opening hours are generally felt most inadequate, the majority of non-Oyster tickets at Sutton can be sorted out with an Avantix. Therefore, in this case it is appropriate to have a first-to-last roving ability to sell tickets, especially if capability of the portable machines staff use is increased.
The real problem comes when the most common fears listed above are realised, such as a stealthy phasing-out of ticket office staff, or inappropriate hours at other stations (eg. Eastbourne, as mentioned). I completely understand many of those points and I am also skeptical about the ability of any portable machine to replicate full ticket office functionality.
There are, however, a few benefits found with these proposals. At present remarkably few of Southern's current gateline staff have training for, or access to, Avantix machines. This means that passengers who turn up at the barriers after travel have no way of being sold a ticket without being let through to use the TVMs (thereby causing issues of trust, as many of these passengers just walk off without buying anyway). Having roving ticket office staff means that they can be positioned around the gateline as needed. Excess fares windows are also unreliable or struggle at many locations. Likewise, roving staff would be helpful for these occasions.
One last point: ticket office staff at many smaller stations will not have all that many places to go other than behind a window or near TVMs, so to be honest the chances of them not being visible are quite slim in some circumstances. There are some larger stations where I struggle to reconcile this point with reality, granted, but at many locations there will be a lack of incentive to wander far. In some ways this can be seen as similar to the drive by crew management to have conductors visible, which both adds value to their jobs in an ever-more-uncertain environment, and also helps the passengers. Conductors are generally visible on Southern services, where they exist at all, though they have discretion to stay in the cabs where it is safest to do so. If a ticket office has staff who are encouraged to stay visible and walk around helping at quieter times, that's all well and good. Problems would only come when ticket office functionality is not suitably replicated on the concourse, or where windows are needed to deal with a linear queue in the neatest manner, or when season tickets are paid for with high volumes of cash, etc. etc. etc.
