On Monday morning the i website published an article suggesting that TfL could soon reclassify Fridays as off-peak all day. Now I know that Avanti West Coast already do this, but they are into long distance travel, and promoting a long weekend when business had already deserted the trains is clearly a smart move. TfL services are very much commuter orientated and while demand is less on Mondays and Fridays, there is still quite a bit of captive traffic.
Add to this the fact that any changes would also have to be adopted by the National Rail companies which would entail agreement with the Department for Transport, and I can say categorically that it won’t be happening. In fact, the DfT would probably have something to say about TfL jeopardising some of their income given that they are still being supported by the government.
I did speak to my contact at TfL and they confirmed that it’s a total non-story, which leads me to the suspicion that someone at the i wanted to play a lame and late April fool joke.
Worse still, doing this would conceivably convince people to switch their “office days” from earlier in the week to the newly cheapened Fridays. The result of that would be to lose even more income than the current Friday ridership would suggest for no actual gain in passengers. A complete lose-lose for TfLs finances.
Probably some additional journeys would be generated but whether that would be sufficient to compensate for the losses caused by the fare change would feel like a gamble at best.
It won’t happen.