Jumping Barrier Incident

[43066]

It shows how the domestic railway could establish a facial recognition ID based ticket system, that could prevent fare evasion and crime, either with barriers that automatically open for ticketed passengers (at staffed stations) or flagging (at unstaffed stations), where onboard staff can then focus resources. Secondly in much of Europe ID is required to buy train tickets.

Maybe for repeat offenders or known criminals walking through London terminals. Hard to see how this can realistically be linked to train tickets, though - personally I would be very concerned about being asked to upload facial images to buy tickets. Equally I don’t think the UK will ever accept mandatory ID for political/cultural reasons.

 

[Brubulus]

What about people in houses. They could conceivably be paedophile murderers. Should we stick CCTV in every living room under the picture of the glorious leader?

You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your living room. You do not on the railway, as is shown by the presence of CCTV.

Well yes, and I think we should have a similar ID system to that, but facial recognition stuff is fantasy. Class 150s with Big Brother cams scanning everyone who’s had to upload their face to buy their two stop single ticket.

Facial recognition cameras for are available already and are almost a drop-in replacement for existing CCTV, however political aspect may be somewhat more difficult, however the ease with which it has been adopted at the border in the name of convenience makes me think it would not be as much of a challenge as some say.

One could argue for some benefits of names on tickets (at least optionally) because you could for instance show it retrospectively if your phone ran out of battery, as you can a Railcard. But that wouldn't presumably be quite definitive enough for enforcement, particularly as we don't have mandatory ID in the UK.

With the ID system, you could simply present ID and that could be scanned to show a valid ticket. With facial recognition you don't need anything since enforcement would know who is likely to not have a valid ticket in advance (false positives may happen so I would be against automatic enforcement, though if they are rare enough, you could do it then appeal with ticket purchase records.)

The non existence of mandatory ID issue can be resolved by amending the railway bylaws to require it on the railway. Uploading your face in advance also seems unnecessary given ID photos can be used, however ID may need to be uploaded to a railway ID database given the lack of a national database in the UK. However without national ID you do hit the barrier jumper/total non payer problem, however this could be resolved to an extent by flagging unknown persons.

 

[pokemonsuper9]

One could argue for some benefits of names on tickets (at least optionally) because you could for instance show it retrospectively if your phone ran out of battery, as you can a Railcard. But that wouldn't presumably be quite definitive enough for enforcement, particularly as we don't have mandatory ID in the UK.

Names and photos on tickets is already the case for season tickets, where I think if the season ticket is forgotten, you can claim back if you buy a ticket if you forget the season ticket once or twice per year (might be remembering incorrectly).

 

[Egg Centric]

You have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your living room. You do not on the railway, as is shown by the presence of CCTV.

This is a very mechanistic way of looking at centuries old legal principles that didn't anticipate the modern day.

They were clearly about state overreach. We need to cut this ****e out with a more purposive interpretation of privacy. Or I'm moving to Zambia*



*Which just passed the most ridiculous internet surveillance law but that's another matter...

 

[AlterEgo]

Facial recognition cameras for are available already and are almost a drop-in replacement for existing CCTV, however political aspect may be somewhat more difficult, however the ease with which it has been adopted at the border in the name of convenience makes me think it would not be as much of a challenge as some say.

It’s not going to happen for £1.95 tickets to travel two stops on the train; the system you describe would require people to voluntarily upload their face.

Of course it only works for passengers whose faces you can see and those which can be seen and recognised.

 

[Purple Train]

What about people in houses. They could conceivably be paedophile murderers. Should we stick CCTV in every living room under the picture of the glorious leader?

This isn't necessarily a dig at you, because some of the monitoring suggestions on this thread are a little over-the-top in my opinion and I understand you're being facetious, but I really dislike the rather tiresome insinuation that any closer monitoring of the population than we already have is indicative of a totalitarian dictatorship. I haven't heard many complaints about democratic backsliding and authoritarianism in Belgium (excuse my language) recently, for instance. And I know that there are oft-quoted cultural differences between Belgium and the UK, but I'm not sure I'd like to argue that we shouldn't have identity cards or similar because of my enshrined cultural right to not be seen by the state picking my nose. Which is ironic given the really lovely sense of community that I feel in many areas of the country.

 

[Sonic1234]

Of course it only works for passengers whose faces you can see and those which can be seen and recognised.

And since COVID, mask wearing is socially acceptable, even if rare these days.

Are there no at station sales under this compulsory ID plan, or can you only use a ticket office or TVM if you have previously uploaded your face?

 

[Darandio]

Of course they are to find murderers and drug dealers on the move between countries. Not to catch Kevin from Catford short faring

Yet B&M have installed it widely and will try to stop you just after entry if you've previously tried to take a handful of Super Noodles.

 

[Egg Centric]

Which is ironic given the really lovely sense of community that I feel in many areas of the country.

The interesting thing is that this sense of community is usually in the places that have very little of this stuff. It's lovely around here. Bit of a cliche but most of us don't lock our doors. We look out for each other. And there wouldn't be barrier jumping.

And my Zambia example, a country I'm very familiar with (and will be in again in July) is even more like that. I actually own much more land in Zambia than I do in the UK and I was literally given it. Albeit with a genuine belief in witchcraft and never mind barriers, escalators are notoriously still a mystery to many.

And then you go down to the south east (as I will be doing tomorrow as I regularly do) and the stress levels (for some - I have an approach more like detached amusement) are all over the place and it's ridiculously congested and there's bugger all community in the above sense (pissed camaraderie on the tube aside) and, well, what is the point in this surveillance exactly? Let's build connections.

 

[Brubulus]

It’s not going to happen for £1.95 tickets to travel two stops on the train; the system you describe would require people to voluntarily upload their face.

Of course it only works for passengers whose faces you can see and those which can be seen and recognised.

Many of the railway's passengers have already voluntarily uploaded their face, age, name and address to the railway, by purchasing a Railcard or Season Ticket.
My proposal was
A. Have the remainder of passengers upload their face, name age and address to the railway
B. Create a database of said names, ages, addresses and faces, linking them to tickets in order to replace paper tickets and digital tickets with a physical or digital ID, while meaning passengers no longer have to carry a ticket and a Railcard, just ID with a Railcard and ticket linked, while using the data generated by this to prevent and detect crime.
C. Use modern technology, already widely used by the police and private sector, to increase the efficiency of the system and further the railways aim of preventing and detecting crime.

Unknown faces, such as those wearing medical or religious face coverings, can be flagged for further inspection by railway staff. TVM purchases or similar would work via the use of an ID scanner, as in parts of Europe.

 

[AlterEgo]

Unknown faces, such as those wearing medical or religious face coverings, can be flagged for further inspection by railway staff.

That should be a fun test of the Equality Act.

 

[Mawkie]

Of course they are to find murderers and drug dealers on the move between countries. Not to catch Kevin from Catford short faring

London Underground did a facial recognition trial at Willesden Green.

There's a decent write up here.

Fare evasion
​

And finally, fare evasion – which was, after all, the reason TfL said that it wanted to try the technology in the first place.

To make it possible for the cameras to spot people jumping the barriers, crawling under the barriers (!), or ‘tailgating’ – when multiple people pass through at the same time – TfL manually scrubbed through and tagged “several hours” of CCTV footage to train the system to teach it what fare evasion looks like.

And it appears the system got pretty good at spotting it.

Here’s one chart showing 3802 fare evasion alerts over the course of June 2023 – there were over 26,000 during eleven months of the trial in total7.

 

[AlterEgo]

London Underground did a facial recognition trial at Willesden Green.

There's a decent write up here.

Did you read the article you linked…? They didn’t do a facial recognition trial!

 

[Mawkie]

Did you read the article you linked…? They didn’t do a facial recognition trial!

Later in the trial, they adapted the software to unblur the faces of fare evaders.

I don't know much about facial recognition, is that not what facial recognition is? Next time they walk into the station, staff could be alerted (but won't be), or images could be used to identify the times and dates offenders walk through the station with a view to revenue attendance.

 

[AlterEgo]

Later in the trial, they adapted the software to unblur the faces of fare evaders.

I don't know much about facial recognition, is that not what facial recognition is?

No. What the trial there is about using AI to recognise anonymised patterns of human behaviour, not faces. They unblurred the faces to look at them, and they then can use the images to build a case. A human actually does the recognition part as the diagram explains, and importantly, they don’t know who the person is until they stop them (which remains a necessary part of the process)

Next time they walk into the station, staff could be alerted (but won't be), or images could be used to identify the times and dates offenders walk through the station with a view to revenue attendance.

That’s what CCTV does.

Facial recognition in this context is where a camera and the software literally recognises a face, says it’s Joe Bloggs of 5 Acacia Avenue, with £7.50 on their Oyster card, who has two outstanding penalty fares unpaid. It’s an authentication tool; what TfL trialled there isn’t quite facial recognition in the proper sense.

 

[sprunt]

This isn't necessarily a dig at you, because some of the monitoring suggestions on this thread are a little over-the-top in my opinion and I understand you're being facetious, but I really dislike the rather tiresome insinuation that any closer monitoring of the population than we already have is indicative of a totalitarian dictatorship.

It's indicative of a shift in the wrong direction on the axis that goes from "Free state" to "totalitarian dictatorship", and certainly makes totalitarian dictatorship easier to implement if someone gets the urge. You might be comfortable withe the current authorities having the monitoring tools, but you're also trusting that you're happy for whoever's in charge in 20 or 50 years to have them too.


Is it really true that lots of Europe requires ID to buy a train ticket? I don't think I've ever been asked for ID when buying a ticket.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Is it really true that lots of Europe requires ID to buy a train ticket? I don't think I've ever been asked for ID when buying a ticket.

No, it's not, though in a lot of cases (but nowhere near all) tickets require names on them and ID can be checked on board (but usually isn't). This is mostly to prevent resale more than anything else.

 

[Meerkat]

Yet B&M have installed it widely and will try to stop you just after entry if you've previously tried to take a handful of Super Noodles.

But I assume the faces are not linked to an ID and they don’t have face-ID data for all their customers.
You would just be in the system as Theif5467 to look out for.*
A precedent for some of these suggestions is the huge overrreaction to investigative powers and surveillance being used to catch litterers and dog poo non-collectors - despite It’s good intentions it resulted in strict controls.
With an ever more dangerous world of populist politicians it is even more important that our freedoms are protected. Sure you might not see any harm with current governments having all this data about you, but what happens when you become the opposition to an authoritarian government and you have given away all your rights?
* And this is what I think the railway should look at. Facial recognition that brings up a file on gatejumper 879 so that if they are travelling to a pattern they can be picked up and get multiple charges.

 

[RGM654]

This is incredibly routine, gateline staff can see that there's three tickets (dots at the bottom, assuming it's a phone) and one quick swipe through is enough to prove it. It's far easier to buy three tickets on one phone and go through the wide-aisle gate as a group than have to awkwardly scan a group through and block the smaller gates. It's unlikely to be fare evasion.

The station in question is entirely unstaffed for much of the time and never (AFAIK) has anyone on the gateline. Is having one ticket for more than one person possible with the gate readers on London Underground? If you present one device (phone or card), can the gate count the number of people passing through?

 

[saismee]

The station in question is entirely unstaffed for much of the time and never (AFAIK) has anyone on the gateline. Is having one ticket for more than one person possible with the gate readers on London Underground? If you present one device (phone or card), can the gate count the number of people passing through?

As far as I know, a ticket can't have more than one person on it. It would need to be three separate tickets. Paper tickets are easy to hand out, but E-Tickets would need to be scanned individually.