On Wed, 7 Jan 2004 16:39:20 +0000, Kat
wrote:

In message , Martin Rich
writes

That's interesting. At present I go out of zone around once a week:
so far I've just bought paper extension tickets and used them exactly
as I would have done with a magnetic season ticket: I touch the Oyster
at the in-zone station, and put the extension in the gate at the
out-of-zone station.

Have you actually done this yet or was that in the days before Pre Pay
was enabled? It won't work now because an extension ticket cannot open
the gate for you and your Oyster will be recording an unresolved
journey. You should be using Pre Pay now.


You're right, of course. I haven't (yet) done this since pre-pay
started.

I had in mind to use pre-pay for this
eventually, but wasn't planning to change over yet.

When the extension fare is taken from your Pre Pay, it will be at the
2003 price and not the new price, so it's worth doing sooner than later
(apart from the trouble at the gate of having your Oyster read and then
maybe having to queue to get the thing sorted out.)

Fair point


The really nice thing would be if Oyster could calculate, when the
season expires, whether it would have been cheaper simply to buy an
extra zone for the season, and charge me the cost of that extra
zone...

2 - 6 Annual ticket is £956.00
1 - 6 Annual ticket is £1068.00

The difference would buy you 70x Zone 1 extension tickets. If you are,
for example, going into and out of Zone 1 once a week, that's 35 x 2
uses so it would be sensible to include Zone 1 on your annual card.

If your season ticket has two zones not including Zone 1 and you go to
another zone, NOT Zone 1 then Pre pay would be cheaper.
(She said, hoping she got the arithmetic right)

You need to sit down with a Fares and Tickets booklet and work out
what's best for you...


My card is for zone 1-2 and the regular out-of-zone journeys are into
zone 3. I used to have a zone1-3 card, until I did sit down with the
fares booklet and worked out that usually zone 1-2 + extensions when
necessary would be cheaper.

On 2003 prices and for an odd-period season (my current one is for a
bit over 3 months and started in late December) zone 1-2 plus
extensions is better value if I make 6 or fewer return underground
trips into zone 3 per month.



If I *do* have both a season and pre-pay on my card, will I then need
to touch my Oyster to one of the readers when I go through Finsbury
Park, which *is* covered by my season

No matter what sort of ticket or Pre Pay alone you have on Oyster, it's
essential to use the yellow reader at both the start and finish of your
journey.

So far, I haven't been doing this at Finsbury Park, and I've done 5
journeys starting or finishing at Finsbury Park so far this week. The
posters at Finsbury Park imply that it's only essential to use the
readers there if you're on pre-pay.

That's why I remain slightly puzzled by the problems with using a
paper extension ticket. If I buy a paper extension, my Oyster record
looks just the same whether I've travelled from a zone 1 station to a
zone 3 station, and presented my extension at the zone3 station, or
I've travelled from zone 1 to Finsbury Park and just walked out of the
station at Finsbury Park. (As it happens I usually travel to or from
Finsbury Park by W3 or W7 bus, so it should be easy enough to deduce
where I've been from the complete record, but I don't think the system
is that clever). At the other end, if the paper extension won't open
the gate, what would I do if I still had a paper season ticket? The
extension ticket and the gate at the zone 3 station don't know what
type of Travelcard I have.

Sorry. I've rambled on for much too long about one obscure case.
Kat: thank you very much for responding to my previous post, and I do
appreciate what you and other LU insiders have brought to the various
Oyster threads

Martin