On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 12:04:09 +0000, Mrs Redboots
wrote:

Why? It is probably cheaper (almost certainly, if you have Pre-pay) to
buy a ticket from Oxford Circus to Brixton & then take one of the 3 or 4
buses that go from there to Crystal Palace, and reverse it. There is no
obligation on you to buy a Travelcard if you don't want to.

And that, as I see it, is a serious fault with the way TfL, and much
of the rest of the UK's public transport, is operated.

A proper connectional public transport system (yes, one of those
things you don't see a lot of in the UK, not even in London) is made
up of a number of interlinked modes, and any one journey may use any
or all of those modes depending on the quickest or most practical
route from point A to point B.

As such, the fare from point A to point B (or over however many zones
- whether the system is zonal or not is irrelevant to the argument)
should be the same, for the use of any or all of those modes.

To do anything different, as the UK tends to, is to artificially
direct people into making long "trunk" journeys by bus rather than
bus+rail+bus, for example, which results in many miles of wasteful bus
routes that don't need to be there at all, and even worse to (often
commercial) bus routes competing against (often subsidised) rail
within a city transport system, which is nothing short of downright
scandalous, and an utter waste of money.

Neil

--
Neil Williams in Milton Keynes, UK
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