On Feb 22, 12:49*pm, wrote:

On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:01:42 -0800 (PST)
Mizter T wrote:
The charge, fine, whatever you want to call it is thus levied
immediately, it's not taken the next day or whenever the next time the
passenger travels.

The end result is what matters , not the specifics of how the system works.
If you don't touch out you end up out of pocket.

Yes - I just saw the sentence "I don't know of many people who pay a
fare for a journey they made the previous day or even weeks before"
and wanted to clarify how the system works. (Though if a card goes
into a negative balance I suppose you could say that person was paying
for it the next time they topped up.)

Touch-out is basically a requirement if there are to be differential
fares - a flat fare (or at least there only being a single fare for
journeys starting from any station) would negate the need for touch-
out, but it seems like a rather unlikely thing to happen. If it did
ever happen, it would only be any good if it was set at a reasonable
level - too high and it would discourage use for shorter journeys. It
would also need a lot more subsidy in order to make it workable. It
would also have the potential to radically shift journey patterns and
demand in quite a big way.

(TfL could even describe the Oyster PAYG £6.50 'entry charge' as a
"flat fare", with "discounted fares" available to those who then touch-
out - a bit similar to the £10 or whatever "standard fare" that bus
companies have outside London - but if TfL were to do this it would
probably be deemed by most people as being somewhat disingenuous.)