Yesterday I asked if anyone could explain why the new restriction applied to places such as Buxton but not to places such as Poynton. What is the logic? Could I encourage a response as I am genuinely perplexed.
This is the way it happens on the railway. A cutoff point has to exist somewhere.
If Northern applied the restriction to all fares they price, it would cause the cutoff point to move to whatever was the first station where another operator set the fare.
... As the exemptions largely follow local authority boundaries the presumption is that authorities such as East Cheshire and Lancashire have made a payment to Northern so that their residents are exempt from the impact of this change in rules, whilst authorities in the Metropolitan areas have made no such payment...
On the contrary; in general fares in the 'Metropolitan' (PTE) areas are generally much lower. Therefore, it is these fares which have the evening peak restrictions applied, to even things up a bit, I guess,.
In some cases, it may be cheaper to buy an Off Peak fare from the last station outside the 'PTE' area than the first station inside the area. However, the differences will not be huge, and on some lines it won't even be any cheaper.
It would be interesting to know if legal challenge against such an abuse of power could be mounted. Of course we may all like the more even-handed Plan B even less!
It
might be an "abuse of power" with regards to the restrictions on the DayRover and Ranger tickets, without knowing the history of those products and the rules regarding on them, I couldn't say.
But it's arguably
not an "abuse of power" to introduce evening peak restrictions on Off Peak Day tickets. Many operators already do this! We can say we don't like it, we can say we don't think it'll raise them much money. We can point out the hassle it will cause for Guards and how confusing it will be for passengers. But they
are allowed to do it; it's not an abuse of their powers.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I think it more likely to be the latter
If they choose not to issue a low value excess fare, because it's not worth the hassle for 30p or 70p or whatever, that's not the customers problem!