asdf wrote:
On 19 Jun 2006 07:53:50 -0700, Neil Williams wrote:

Your fare is not something to be paid only if you cannot avoid it - you
are using a service that costs money to provide and so you should pay
for it. If you don't want to pay your tube fare then get the bus!

Hardly. The OP is travelling with an Oyster card, using it as
instructed. The correct fare is by definition the one that is charged,
so long as he/she has touched in and out as required.

The only way to evade a fare deliberately by Oyster is not to touch
in/out as required.

So what about the following example. I live between Woodford and South
Woodford, and feel like a trip round the Circle Line. So I touch in at
Woodford, travel into London and go once round the Circle, then back
out to South Woodford, where I touch out and walk home. Assuming the
time limit for the journey doesn't get in the way, I pay only the
Woodford to South Woodford fare. Is this fare evasion?


More importantly, by what means could you be charged the correct fare?

It's bad enough that in order to be charged correctly for extensions,
you have to get off, go up the escalator, out the gate with your paper
season, in the gate with your Oyster, back down the escalator and wait
for the next train (why don't they have readers in trains?).

But the journey you describe seems to me to be a single journey
involving zones 1 to 4, the same as if you went from Woodford to
Perivale or something, which I think should cost £2.

Doing what you described you'd presumably be charged £1 (I don't know
if the time limit would really allow it).

If you got off during your trip round the Circle Line, touched out and
then touched in again, you would be charged for two trips involving
zones 1 to 4, which would come to £4.

So the correct fare seems not to be possible. Perhaps the answer is
not to do anything so strange.