Neil Williams wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:33:22 +0000, Dave Arquati
wrote:

Counting zone boundaries crossed is useless if you want to discourage
people from entering or using a particularly busy part of the network if
they don't need to. Under that system, a journey from Shadwell to New
Cross would be priced the same as one from King's Cross to Victoria.

OK, so you charge X per zone boundary crossed, plus Y if you cross
zone 1. That said, I don't think that in general charging more to go
through zone 1 will dissuade all that many people from doing so, just
as hiking the fuel tax doesn't stop people travelling by car. I would
think that the majority of journeys on a system like TfL are more
time- than price-sensitive, TBH, certainly the peak ones.

Perhaps that's the case for a large (richer) proportion of the
travelling population. However, the explosion in bus use has shown that
people are attracted to a cheaper option if it can deliver the goods.
I'd say four out of five times, I use the bus to reach the West End
because it's a lot cheaper (my return bus journey costs less than a
single Tube journey).

The different with the Tube is that there is often not an option to
avoid Zone 1 - this will change when Silverlink services are brought
into the TfL fares structure, which I believe will happen fairly soon.

If the East London line northern extension is in Zone 2, it will offer
an attractively-priced alternative for journeys to the Liverpool St area
for travellers who are more price- than time-sensitive.

The point was that you can define a zonal (or similar) fares structure
with rules to fit whatever pattern of usage you like. "Fairness"
doesn't really come into it, because as with a national telephone call
these days there is no directly-attributable cost to a given journey,
because the buses, tubes and trains are going to run whether that one
specific journey was being made or not.

I would say that it is better for an urban network to define your
fares structure in simple terms like that than it is to have someone
sit down and arbitrarily price fares from A to B and C to D
separately.

I agree with the simple terms, and I think the current system is
appropriate. There are only 8 different single fares within zones 1-6 on
prepay.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London