The Before Times
A few years ago, people using contactless cards at my local railway station could tap their card on a card-tapping machine. There were several of them, on many different walls. It was quick and easy.
Going in? Tap and beep. Person staring uncomprehendingly at one machine? Use the other one across the corridor, or a bit further up, or just over there. Tap and beep.
Going out? Tap and beep. Any machine. Doesn't matter. Just make sure you do the tap and hear the beep and it'll be all good.
Using a paper ticket? How very retro of you. On your way. Nothing to do except leave. Or enter. Depending on whether... well, you can work out the rest.
Then The Gates Came
The old tap and beep machines are still there but they are decommissioned and sad and turned off. They do not glow or beep, no matter how much you may tap them.
Instead, you must now use the gates, with a tapping pad on them and some of the slowest response of any machine in the twenty-first century. (There may be slight exaggeration in that sentence.)
The queues, or scrums, or disorderly gaggle fills the corridor and clogs the stairs as each person taps, waits for a beep, waits for the gates to heave themselves open.
Anyone rushing to get onto a train can forget about it. There are people waiting to tap and beep and they ain't clearing the corridor or stairs for anyone.
This does not seem like an improvement.
But The Revenue Is Protected (Oh No It Isn't)
No it really isn't. On any given day, you can watch a person or two or twelve tail-gate someone else through the gate, or just do a little hip-swivelling shimmy to nudge the gates apart enough to allow them to leave.
The dour-faced under-trained, high-vis-jacketed man stands and observes. No doubt intervention is above his pay grade.
The honest, upstanding, ticket buying member of society is delayed in a scrum of despond while the scallywagg fare evader is untroubled.
So the installation of gates has inconvenienced the innocent while making no difference to the guilty. I wonder how much they cost to bolt onto the floor, how much they cost to maintain, how much they cost to run (electricity is quite expensive right now, don't you know) and how much fare evasion they have prevented...
Other Gates
Last month, an Avanti train arrived at Oxenholme station (in the beautiful lake district) so late that the staff had locked the station and gone home. You can read the shocking story here.
Some passengers climbed over the two-metre (spiked) gates in order to leave. The rest had to wait for the police to find a maintenance worker who had a key.
Given that the gates could be climbed by some (several? loads?) of passengers, and assuming that they weren't competitors returning from a parkour convention, I think it's reasonable to assume that the gates aren't that great at stopping able-bodied people from getting into or out of the station.
So anyone wishing to get up to mischief at that station could probably just climb in, using the assumption that railway mischief-makers are generally going to be able to climb. (You've only got to look at some of the astonishing places that railway graffiti ends up to realise that railway ruffians are good at scaling heights.)
Which means that these gates are also fairly pointless since all we're certain they've done is to imprison passengers for the 'crime' of travelling on a late train.
Money
Yes, it all comes back to money in the end.
Anti-money-laundering approaches are like railway gates. How many times must we jump through bankers' hoops to prove our identity so that they can know their customers?
And how many times does that stop people's accounts being drained by scammers? One approach, apparently, is to fool someone into moving funds into another (innocent but stupid) person's account, who is then instructed to move the money again, thereby fooling banks by the amazing process of moving money twice.
Don't the banks know the person in the middle? Because they know their customer, don't they? And wouldn't they know where the money was going to? Because they would know that customer as well, wouldn't they?
What's that you say? The money goes to a foreign account? Oh, that explains it then. Because all financial services outside the UK are completely unregulated and therefore it's impossible to ever, ever, ever track any money that's gone into that lawless realm. (I'm being sarcastic.)
So we, the innocent and the honest, wave our photocopied passports and paper utility bills (who has paper utility bills?) and receive one-time passcodes on our phones and are sent passwords in the mail and wait and wait and wait and wait.
While the dodgy dealers simply push through the bankers' useless gates or vault the financials' fence. While the data-protecting high-vis jacketed bank staff look on and say there's nothing they can do.
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