On Jul 10, 11:18*am, Mizter T wrote:
On Jul 10, 10:50*am, John B wrote:





On Jul 10, 12:17*am, MIG wrote:

[snip]

A travelcard is valid on National Rail. *Pay As You Go (which I think
you mean by Oyster) is not valid on most of National Rail yet,
although there are some routes where it is.

If you want to travel on National Rail on a given day, it's probably
cheaper to have a travelcard than to use a combination of PAYG and
National Rail tickets, but you'd need to work it out for each case.

A travelcard season ticket can be added to an Oyster Card. *If it's
valid for whole of the journey you are making, none of your PAYG
credit will be deducted.

Also, if you make two peak journeys a day even just on London
Underground, an annual Travelcard is cheaper per day than Oyster PAYG
would be.

Worth emphasising that John is referring to an *annual* Travelcard, as
opposed to a weekly or a monthly, in which case the situation might be
different an Oyster PAYG *may* be cheaper.

Also, the statement isn't necessarily true for journeys that don't
involve zone 1 anyway! Example - a two zone commute (that's a
combination of any two zones outside zone 1). The Oyster PAYG fare is
£1.10 (and is the same at peak and off-peak PAYG times) - so a weekly
commute (there and back five out of seven days) is £11, and even if
one was to do this 52 weeks of the year without a break, it would come
to £572. Meanwhile a two-zone annual Travelcard (for any two zone
combo outside z1) costs £664.

Of course the Travelcard would bring with it the benefit of allowing
unlimited travel in those two zones on LU and NR (and DLR), and
unlimited bus travel anywhere in London, and would also mean one would
likely pay less for LU journeys that started in one of those two zones
and ended elsewhere (courtesy of the automatic ticket extension
facility granted by having a combo of Travelcard and PAYG on one card)
- and the annual Travelcard would provide Gold Card benefits too - so
it'd certainly be worthwhile considering it.

Point being, there's no absolute rule that says an annual Travelcard
will be cheaper than merely using PAYG.

Oops. Forgot about those lucky[*] types who don't have to go into/
through Z1 for their commute!
[*] FSVO lucky. I'm still slightly traumatised by the six months I
spent attempting to commute z2-z2 using the Silverlink in pre-LO days.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org