please empty your brain below

Walthamstow ticket office is open for over 100 hours a week meaning it sells just 3 tickets an hour. Taking into account wages and overhead costs that equates to the cost of selling each ticket being around £10.
very much looking forward to DG's review of the Power Booster Capsule - imagine how many more steps per day you'll be able to get in for the count!
I'm not surprised to see Forest Gate in the top 10 and just miss out on the top 5. The staff members working the ticket office always look extremely bored.
When you said "they've never sold tickets on the North London line", I think you actually meant on the GOBLIN?

Use it or lose it, indeed.

dg writes: Fixed, thanks.
Fascinating and what I have for a long time strongly suspected.

I did wonder if the ticket offices in questions weren't really open despite the official opening hours but no-one including you is suggesting this so I suspect they really are open.

It is getting to the point where lack of ticket offices closures is a scandal and I really don't understand why the mayor hasn't taken action or TfL board members haven't vociferously pointed this out.

Although 2022 may have been an exceptional year, the trend has always been downwards and I expect will continue.

I do wonder how many tickets have ever been sold at Hoxton. I doubt if it is enough to justify building the ticket office in the first place. Acton Main Line was another obvious basket case (I pointed this out years ago). Despite the unexpectedly high usage of the station nowadays it seems this confirms this.

And by what logic does Rotherhithe have a ticket office but nearby Canada Water (on the same line plus the Jubilee line) not do so?

Finally, don't forget this nonsense is replicated on National Rail. Tattenham Corner has a ticket office that I think is normally open, Coulsdon Town ticket office is open all day seven days a week despite now being one of the ten least used Network Rail stations in London.
I've no idea of the cost of operating these ticket offices and how much it would "buy" elsewhere, but at a time when bus routes are being cut, what's more useful to London?
Meanwhile on the Cable Car, the only way of buying a ticket is from a human being, and the option of using pay as you go is borderline discouraged. Perhaps other TfL ticket offices should start "upselling" Valentine's Day packages and the like?
What group are you keeping these offices open for?, perhaps the next FOI should be about where are they travelling to?, how many are buying tickets for non-standard journeys vs how many for routine ones that are covered by Oyster/PAYG.

At some point take the decision to close the ticket offices or transfer the overheads to the user.
How does being a ‘national rail’ station make it harder to close? What process has to be followed or evidence gathered compared to a pure TFL station?
I'll never understand the difference between The Tube, The Underground, The Overground and Crossrail.

Can't you just do suburban services and country trains?
My local national railstation in SE London has a ticket office. My unscientific observation is that ticket sales are very low. I use it to buy extensions to my Freedom Pass when I want to travel outside of the TFL Z6 boundary. It isn't possible to buy an extension on line or from a ticket machine, so its a problem for me on the occasions when the ticket office is closed. The only option for buying an extension online or from a machine is to identify the last station on the journey that is within Z6 and buy a tickey from there. However this is problematic if I want to travel out and back on different routes ( for example Waterloo to Dorking, returning to London Bridge).

In addition to West Croydon and Norwood Junction, which as you note are also served by Southern/Thameslink, Forest Hill, Crystal Palace and Brockley are too. I wonder if the tickets they sell through their Overground-run ticket offices are mainly for those operators' trains.

I've bought tickets for further afield from one of those ticket offices in the days before the machines were upgraded and my Network Railcard was a piece of card.
Presumably at smaller stations a member of staff has to attend everyday to check everything anyway, so that probably justifies having the ticket office open for a couple of hours.
My underground ticket office is staffed. He watches people push through and jump the barriers and when he goes home he leaves them open.
Boneyboy, I discovered recently (using BRFares) when travelling to Brighton that the fare from East Croydon is cheaper than from the Z6 boundary. I presume this is because fares from the former are set by Thameslink and from the latter by Southern. I don't know if there are any more such instances.
Upon reading today's post, I was pretty certain that Rotherhithe, my local Overground station, doesn't have a ticket office so I went down and had a look. Just to the left of the gateline, there are glazed-in counters similar in layout to the ones in the image of Walthamstow Central and with the same style of banner above but bearing just the word "Information". I took a photograph as evidence but as I turned to leave, the woman who had been fiddling with her mobile phone in front of the left-hand counter moved out of the way to reveal an A4-sized notice stuck to the glass which advertised the (very restricted) hours that tickets were on sale so with such limited advertising I'm not surprised that Rotherhithe only sold 63 tickets in 2022.
Do wonder if Off-Peak hours might be better? Regulars know the ropes. The ability to pop down to your local station later in the day might be quite attractive to less frequent travellers.
I guess people are now so used to finding no live ticket offices in most of our stations that they don't expect to find them anywhere. We had plenty of passengers using South Acton station in 21/22 - nearly 600,000 - but it seems only 80 found it necessary to buy a physical ticket!
When the ticket offices were shut, my local station bricked up the "public" window. However, if the gates are in operation, to attract the "staff" member's attention (invariably sitting in the office), one has to crane across the barriers and shout...
What would be a more interesting statistic would be the number of queries that attendants deal with at each station. Probably never counted.
Stamford Hill Overground Station has a ticket office and isn't in the figures?

dg writes: smallprint updated, sorry, thanks.
Overground ticket office usage in 2022 won't have been helped by the removal in 2021 of the ability to buy Oysters and Oyster products at them - I understand there was a big price ticket to upgrading the IT infrastructure, but it has meant some big spend transactions can't be made at them anymore, especially annual travelcard renewals, which can't be done at the machines.

I much prefer to do those renewals at ticket offices rather than online, not least so that a Gold Card can be issued immediately, so once the facility was removed at Underground stations, I used to wander over to my nearest Overground station annually. As that is Rotherhithe, I now feel very virtuous that I was making £1,900 payments annually at the second-least used ticket office. They should give me a plaque or something.










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