Far better surely that such a system is designed in mind that someone might choose not to use it than that they'll get whatever they're given. I'm not sure why you would be outraged by this.
If thats not a good enough example, there are plenty of government departments that require payment for their services and I think the same would apply. Like renewing a passport, I would hate to be called a customer.
The railways in the UK don't work well from the point of view of getting people from A-B, from the point of few of extracting a lot of money from Customers they work extremely well.
Perhaps it should. Surely it must have been tried somewhere?
There are cities with free transit systems however.
No they're not. They are partly funded by general taxation, just like the NHS. However, if you want to drive your car on the road, you can't just drive it. You have to first pay a specific 'vehicle tax' which is per vehicle, per year: https://www.gov.uk/tax-disc
Furthermore, if you want to drive in most of Central London during the day time on a weekday, you have to pay the congestion charge: https://www.tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge
The angst is because you largely don't have such a choice.
Because other mass transit systems tend to treat people as cattle herd.
Mind you, this attitude is worth a lot. Especially when confronted with "you are the product" bullshit everywhere else.
We should be so lucky. You'd get arrested if you put a cattle herd through what passengers are put through on some London trains.
The problem with the term customer in the article is that it felt like they would count the same customer multiple times (when they mean passenger). If I ride daily, I'm not 5 customers, I'm one repeat customer. But I'm a passenger 5 times.
All in all though, I think this will be a welcome change as every time I travel to London and go on the tube at rush hour, I'm thankful that I work in a nice quiet cemetery.
See, e.g., http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/extrahelp/.
It's a long term and well-thought-out attempt by marketers to change the public's expectations of their relationship with public transport. This started twenty years ago with privatisation of the railways: probably the new private train operators felt a change in terminology was required to make people accept they were no longer dealing with a state-owned network and that the balance of power had shifted towards private enterprise.
Basically an attempt at using linguistics to reprogram a large population. But it hasn't worked: people are very conscious of new words being forced upon them and the result is that it makes the industry look sleazy.
For an airline, transportation is an unfortunate side-effect of getting paid. For the tube, managing tickets is an unfortunate side effect of transporting people.
> Consider an empty plane where all the seats are paid for by passengers that all coincidentally were late to the airport. That's not a problem for the airline, because the tickets got sold and it was the passengers fault. However, this is a failure for the tube, for which payment is secondary
In both cases, the airline and the tube have fixed costs related to having planes flying or trains running. For both of them payments are necessary to offset the fixed costs and generate profits to further invest in better transports.
They key difference is that for one the volume of passengers is much higher than the other, therefore "full capacity" is defined in very different terms in the Tube vs a plane. People don't stand in a plane like they do in the Tube.