--- Phil Richards said...
Solar Penguin wrote:

And even better still for LUL to adopt point-to-point instead of all
that zone nonsense.

Why not be silly enough to suggest that London Buses go back to a
system of fare tables for each route?

What's silly about that? In the present system, even if you just take a
*local* bus ride, just a couple of stops or so, you have to pay the same
as a journey the *whole length* of the bus route! Think how much money
you could save if you only paid for the short journey you actually
travel, instead of all those miles you don't!


Remember zonal fares in London have been in force for over 20
years now

And that's what scientists call "the Concorde fallacy", i.e. "We've been
trying, without any success, to make this thing work for so many years
now, that it's pointless to give up now, even though when we finally do
get something that works, it won't be worth all the effort we've put
into it!"

Face it, twenty years is *too* long. It's definitely time to get rid of
the zones by now. Long overdue in fact.


the TOCs are the ones dragging their feet in not fully adapting
to a proper integrated fare structure which you'll find
commonplace in many European cities.

We should have a proper integrated fare structure, true. But it should
be based on point-to-point fares, not zones.

Face facts, the zones are just a con to make us pay for distances we
haven't travelled. For example, you get on an East London Line train at
New Cross to travel across the river to Wapping. But you can't buy a
ticket to Wapping. Instead, you have to buy a Zone Two ticket that's
valid beyond Wapping, all the way to Bromley-by-Bow! And no chance of
getting a refund on the unused portion of your ticket.

Another example, you have a choice of fast Metropolitan Line trains or
slow Jubilee Line trains when travelling from Wembley Park to Baker
Street. Common sense says that the faster trains should be more
expensive. That way, any customers who want to save money can use the
cheaper, slower trains. But because of the stupid zonal system, we all
end up paying to travel on the Metropolitan trains, with no option for a
cheaper ticket.

Yes, the zones work for maximising LUL's profit, but are crap at giving
good value to customers. No truly fair fares can ever come out of it.
(Admittedly, the NR TOCs aren't always fair in practice either, but at
least a fair point-to-point system could be made. That's impossible
with a zonal system, and always will be.)