London Banter - View Single Post - Boris - remove this absurd Oyster vs cash cost disparity

Tim Roll-Pickering · May 6th 08, 10:24 PM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote:

The advantage of people paying by oyster isn't just reduced costs.
It's also faster journey times. It used to take forever for a long
queue to board a bus, when many people were paying cash. Now that
paying cash is significantly more expensive, hardly anyone does.

In a sense, having to effectively pay a penalty for using cash is the
price we pay for faster journey times. I don't think the people who
are responsibe for the difference between oyster and cash fares were
motivated by spite.

I'd be a lot more sympathetic if the system was geared up to make it easier
to actually use Oyster throughout. Generally when I'm travelling by bus it's
either at night or weekends, when it's significantly harder to find a place
to top up the Oyster due to all the convenience stores being shut, and these
are precisely the times when people need the safety of bus travel. Then I'm
not sure where one can actually buy an Oyster card from (we don't have a
tube station here). Both of these are impossible to do so at the bus stops.