Tom Anderson wrote:

Did i mention a conspiracy? Why do you keep telling me there isn't one?
Very suspicious if you ask me!

Solar Penguin implied s/he thought there was a conspiracy, which is
what I addressed in my previous-previous reply.

[I wrote:]
Are you personally paying for every passenger to travel that extra
distance? No. Do some passengers get a better "per mile" fare? Yes. So
what?

You can't say yes to one of those and no to the other!

Watch me :-)

If some people are getting more for their money, that means i'm
getting less, which means i am personally paying for them.

One suggestion is that the additional revenue raised from pricing
cross-London journeys as you suggest, bearing in mind the very small
proportion of journeys made falling into this category, would just
cover the cost of implementing that scheme. In other words, there
would be no net gain in income for TfL.

Therefore, even by raising the price for long journeys in this way, it
would not be possible to reduce the fare that you pay. So although one
POV says that you are subsidising those passengers, as there is no
effective and fair way to remove that subsidy, it doesn't count.

perhaps when hojillions of commuters from are travelling from the west
to Canary Wharf or Stratford City.

Will Crossrail be subject to the same pricing structure as the rest of
the Underground? If not, there is no problem. If so, maybe it will
become an issue - but maybe not. I suspect that most commuters have
season tickets, so the relative prices are not as simple as for
individual tickets, as we are discussing.

No harder than it is now: if you want a single, you hit the button on
a ticket machine and give it the money it asks for. The further you
go, the more you pay, with outer zones costing less than inner ones.
There are more combinations of zones to be priced, but i don't think
that matters: it's not as if users of the system memorise the entire
fare table, they just use the heuristics i describe above.

That assumes they use a machine that has all the stations listed. When
I was working in London (a few years ago now, so it might have
changed), there were some machines that just listed the different
fares, with one big button next to them that you pushed for that
ticket. These are very quick because there are so few choices for
passengers to make.

Yes, this is the same as Z4-Z1-Z4, but that's because a Z1-Z3 ticket costs
the same as a Z1-Z4 (now *that* is barmy ticket pricing).

Yes, totally barmy!

You would very soon find that either most tickets for cross-London
travel were cheaper than Travelcards or,

ITYM more expensive.

Indeed I do.

At present, yes. However, if you accept the idea that Zn-Z1-Zn is not the
same as Zn-Z1 for singles, it's natural to extend the idea to travelcards.
Intuitively, i think the travelcard i use to commute to work, a Zn-Z1
journey, should cost less than a travelcard which let me go all the way
across London when i felt like it. However, as we both observed, this is
very tough to implement.

Why limit it to that? Why not limit it to one route? If I buy a
Travelcard to go from Croydon to London and back, should I be allowed
to go via Wimbledon? Beckenham? Where do you draw the line? Short of a
honeycomb, it becomes very difficult. Much simpler to have solar zones
as we do now.

It is very simple - there are three zonal variants (Z1-2, Z1-4 and Z1-6
[1]).

Was there supposed to be a footnote attatched to that?

Yes, I don't know where it went. It was supposed to say
[1] Or at least, there were last time I looked, but this might have
changed.

It's a few years since I lived in London, and I am largely going by
memory rather than carefully checking that TfL haven't changed things
since.

Making it substantially more complex does. Making it very slightly more
complex might not. For example, honeycomb zones might work.

I can see them working on a much smaller region. West Yorkshire, Tyne
& Wear, Merseyside, Greater Manchester are all examples of places
where I think honeycombing could work. Probably not the West Midlands
or Glasgow, and definitely not London. You would just need too many
zones. Either that or each zone would be very large.

Exactly the same as now: the ticket would have to cover every zone
your journey actually does pass through.

Yes, I realise that.

Let's say that you want to travel from Surbiton to Barking, then to
Harrow, then back to Surbiton.

It might be that you plan to go into London and out again for each leg
of the journey. That will be the relevant cells between Central London
and each of Surbiton, Harrow and Barking.
But what if you then change your mind and travel on the Southern/
Silverlink service via Olympia? Or the Goblin? That would involve
several other cells on orbital routes, and would require you to plan
your day's travel far more carefully.

It would make it a much longer process to buy a travelcard other than
for straight into London and back, which the stations would make very
easy just because of the sheer volume of them that they would sell.
But in this case, you might have to ask for a Travelcard covering
zones 4D, 3D, 2C, 1, 2B, 3B, 4B, 2D, 3F, 4G, 5G, 3E. For example.
Unless you are buying your ticket from a machine that has a
touch-sensitive map, it is going to be complex, long-winded and prone
to mistakes.

It then makes it much harder to work out what routes you can travel
on. If I buy a TC that gets me from Bromley to London and back -
that's fine. But if I change my mind, and want to call in at Beckenham
on the way back ... is that allowed? What cell is that in - is it on
my ticket? What about Crystal Palace? Greenwich?

Travelcards are supposed to be totally flexible; that is precisely why
they are so phenomenally popular. By making them so specific, you are
badly eroding this flexibility

Exactly the same as in three days' time: you don't buy a travelcard, you
use pre-pay, and the system caps you to the appropriate travelcard price.

Is that actually going to work? Last I heard, Oyster was having great
difficulty in evaluating when it was going to be cheaper to use
Travelcard prices and when individual prices.

TCs are great. What they offer is a simple, easy to understand,
instant to buy way for people to travel around London making full use
of the different modes of transport available. Anything to replace
them that is tube-specific penalises those in south London, anything
that is rail-specific penalises those in north London.

Those are both utter strawmen, and you know it.

Do I?

Mainline/suburban rail services have a different pricing structure to
the UndergrounD. Yes, Travelcards span them both, but if this idea of
forty zones instead of 6 were to take off, I could imagine ATOC
telling TfL where to shove it, and not participating in the scheme in
the same way.

Meanwhile, the TC just penalises people who want to commute to and
from work, because it forces them to buy a ticket which gives them far
more than they need.

In which case, they should just buy individual tickets, if that works
out cheaper. If not, hard luck.

*Anyone* who buys a Travelcard gets more than they need. Well, I
assume they do. I assume there isn't someone out there who buys a
Travelcard then uses the trains, buses, tubes and trams continuously
from 0500 to close, gleefully shouting "I'm getting my money's worth!"
all the way.

If I buy a season rail ticket from Selby to York, as I have
contemplated doing, this entitles me to make as many journeys between
Selby and York as I wish to (and, in fact, on most routes as far as
Goole, Doncaster, Sheffield, Huddersfield and Leeds). In reality, I
would only be making one return journey a day, five days a week - six
very occasionally. Five hours on the train every week is a very small
proportion of the journeys that that ticket would entitle me to make.

Would I complain that I was being ripped off? Of course not - it's a
ridiculous thing to suggest.

The alternative that your suggestion would lead to is to charge users
for every single journey they make. Otherwise, someone is always going
to be getting a better deal than someone else - which you don't accept
can be fair. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the convenience of
having unlimited travel far outweighs the possible injustice that
someone might make an extra journey to you that they are not paying
anything additional for.

I'm actually, and very tentatively, in favour of scrapping travelcards
altogether. Prepay all round! Better yet, postpay - i travel, then i get a
bill at the end of the month, perhaps along with my council tax (if i live
in London, anyway).

For what benefit? There would be *massive* additional costs to setting
up such a system and to running and maintaining it. The result would
be, as I said earlier, that virtually _nobody_ would pay any less than
they do now, but plenty of people would end up paying more, just to
cover the extra costs of the system. Quite how that would benefit
passengers is beyond me.

Prepay systems might work for residents and regular travellers - and
postpay (although I think that would have to work of direct debit or
something similar) - but what about infrequent travellers, or tourists
from abroad? Such people do form a very significant proportion of the
travelling public off-peak in London, and any complications in the
system will cause exponential delays and problems for such people.

Agreed. Was anyone actually suggesting that this is what we should do?

Solar Penguin.

--
Stevie D
\\\\\ ///// Bringing dating agencies to the
\\\\\\\__X__/////// common hedgehog since 2001 - "HedgeHugs"
___\\\\\\\'/ \'///////_____________________________________________