Tom Anderson wrote:
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!


For a LU to LU journey is buying a Travelcard in some way more difficult
than buying a point to point ticket?