On Fri, 20 May 2005, gay merrington wrote:

I am a Canadian now living over here,and in Toronto (where I'm from) we
have our transit system (the busses and tube) running on a single fare
system where for about 80p gets you anywhere the transit runs in town on
any and all connecting routes.It seems absoultely horrendous that we
here in London have to pay through the nose by paying for every bus we
hop on when other cities around the world have similar systems around
the world are similar to Toronto (one fare covers destination to
destination travel instead of one fare per ride).Does anyone else think
this is highway robbery?

Yes. Not the prices, or the difference in price between tube and bus
tickets, which are a function of the different costs and business model
here, but the lack of through tickets for buses or multimodal trips (or a
system of 'transfers', which is how it's handled in Vancouver).

Tube tickets are more or less fine - you pay a price based on zonal
distance, then you use however many trains it takes to get there. That's
how it should be. Buses, however, are not fine - you pay per leg, not for
the whole journey, so i might have to pay two or three times as much for a
journey as someone else making one of similar length, just because TfL
decided to give him a direct service rather than me - talk about adding
insult to injury!

It's just as bad if you want to go multimodal - if your trip is between LU
and NR stations, you can use any combination of tubes and trains, i think,
but you can't, AIUI, use a train as part of an LU-LU trip (not that
there's ever a pressing need to), and you can't make buses or trams part
of your journey either.

And before someone starts bleating about travelcards - i'm talking about
simple journeys. People shouldn't have to buy a bleeding travelcard to
make a single journey cost-effectively!

tom

--
20 Minutes into the Future