Understandable by passengers

Passengers need to understand not only what the correct fare for their journey is, but also how that fare was derived. The latter is important both to respond to their fear of being overcharged, and also to allow for ‘customer’ reviews of travel options and trade-offs.

The more simple a fare structure, the more amenable it is to understanding. At one extreme, a flat fare for all travel irrespective of distance and time of day is unambiguous. At the other extreme, for a customer to determine the fare for a particular trip when the fare structure is distance based and finely graduated (and may have routing options) can be very difficult even with external assistance.

However balancing the interests of consumer and producer requires some degree of fare differentiation by distance of travel, and this will inevitably introduce a degree of complexity to the fare system. Under these circumstances, it is normal to trade off some degree of accuracy in matching the fare to the trip – and hence making the graduations relatively coarse so that few different fares are chargeable on a specific route or for a linked journey.