On Fri, 07 Oct 2005 13:36:06 +0100, Laurence Payne
wrote:

How would YOU encourage people onto Oyster?

Make Oyster suitable for them, as I've detailed in other posts.

Then, once that's all been done, abolish paper ticketing completely.

Neil

--
Neil Williams in Milton Keynes, UK
When replying please use neil at the above domain
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On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 19:17:33 +0100, "TKD" wrote:

An outside London ODTC is based on the travelcard price
plus whatever the rail company charges to the boundary
of Zone 6. The ODTC1-6 has gone up by 30p. The Zone 1
tube single doesn't even come in to the equation.

There are still singles to ZONE U1 LONDN, which presumably will be
based on that. There are also returns, but those (last time I
checked) were the same price as the Peak Travelcard.

The difference, incidentally, is that YP Railcard discount is
available on singles/returns to ZONE U1 LONDN but not at all on Peak
Travelcards (not even on the rail part), so last time I did a peak
journey it was on one of those.

Neil

--
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On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:02:39 +0200, "tim \(moved to sweden\)"
wrote:

IME most people have 2 weeks off at Xmas because their
employer gives them no choice.

Most people I know don't. I think it depends on the industry, and MX
is that more and more companies not in the manufacturing industry do
not have a factory shutdown at Christmas - but the exact opposite in
that they won't *allow* everyone to be off then!

And most people take 2 (or more) weeks holiday in the
summer/easter when the kids are off school.

Only if you have kids. The rest of us who don't avoid those times
like the plague.

I guess if you work in retail (or hospitality) it's different, but
I would be suprised if almost every one else didn't fit the above.

Banking (OK, almost retail), anything that involves call centres and
IT to name but three. Service industries in general do not have
long-term shutdowns. People expect all-year service (except in many
but not all cases 25/12) these days.

Things do vary from country to country, of course. YM (in Sweden) MV,
if your from address is anything to go by!

Neil

--
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On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 23:30:20 +0100, Phil Richards
wrote:

At least you know about the options.

I do, and I would not be averse to having an Oyster if it made sense.
I rarely use buses in Milton Keynes, but I do have an MK Metro Saver
card lying around for the few occasions when it does come in handy,
and it did cost me a fiver (though at the time I was using buses
daily).

That isn't even as convenient as Oyster as sadly the only thing you
can load onto it is a weekly or monthly pass, as it's quite an old
technology. If you could put a tenner of "pre-pay" onto it I'd
definitely do so to avoid having to fuss with change, even if the
fares weren't lower.

Now - will people accept I'm not anti-Oyster?

The ones that get caught out will be
the infrequent users, tourists etc. who fail to find out and, worse still,
won't be advised by ticket sellers at stations they have a cheaper option
when they fork out 3 quid for a cash single. That's what TfL/LUL need to
concentrate on next.

Absolutely. I would suggest they needed to do that *before* the
punitive fares were proposed. That said, they have 3 months or so to
get their act together...

Neil

--
Neil Williams in Milton Keynes, UK
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On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 23:35:34 +0100, Phil Richards
wrote:

Nick Cooper wrote:

Except that if you buy a book of 1st Class stamps before a price-rise
for basic 1st Class, the "old price" stamps are still valid at the
"new price."

The same could be said about the Saver 6 tickets which could have been
bought at the old price before the fares went up and used after.

True. It's only a recent thing, though - I'm fairly sure that 1st and
2nd class stamps used to have the price printed on them, so if you had
a load and the price went up you had to go to the Post Office and buy
a load of 1 or 2p stamps to be able to use them.

Neil

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"Richard J." wrote in message
. uk...
That's because they're in the London Borough of Wandsworth, famous for
setting a zero poll tax, and which still has a very low council tax
rate. I assume that by some quirk of government funding, LBW have
managed to get an extremely favourable deal.

I don't think that Wandsworth gets a particularily good deal on its
government funding but it is much more efficient than most councils..

Regards
Sunil

"Arthur Figgis" ] wrote in message
...
On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:07 +0100 (BST), (Colin
Rosenstiel) wrote:


We had that problem in Warsaw. It seemed easier to walk everywhere
than work out how to buy bus and tram tickets.

Many places seem to assume visitors will use taxis for everything.

That's because many Americans do. And as I have posted before,
IME it is common for non first language English speakers not to
be able to tell the difference between the various English language
countries' accents (strange as it may seem to you and I).


Little kiosks called RUCH sell them.

Them being sufficiently imprecise to non-Polish speakers to decide not
to bother. Or the kiosks weren't open. One or the other.

IIRC on some Polish trams you even need a separate ticket for your
bag.

You do in Milan as well.

Debrecen in Hungary has excellent information on ticketing options in
multiple languages at its tram stops. Unlike somewhere I've forgotten
where I once went, where the tourist-specific literature was only
available in the local language, which was Basque or Slovenian or
something else which visitors would be pretty unlikely to speak.

What I find annoying is some countries[1] insistance on translating,
into multiple languages, the instructions for using the machine (put
money in slot etc), which IMHO a child the age of 10 can work
out for themselves and keeping the complicated zonal rules only
in the home language. How on earth can I "press the button for
the correct ticket for you journey" if you haven't told me how I
can work out what actually is the correct ticket for my journey.

When I went to Charleroi the tram ticket office wouldn't sell me a day
ticket until an English-speaking native stepped in to help me. The
staff were convinced that I must have thought I was in Brussels, as
they thought no-one in their right mind would go to their city.

The Dutch Strippenkaart is in the process of being replaced by a
national all-modes smart card, but I believe it is delayed because of
various problems with it. Denmark has just awarded the same people a
contract for a national smart card.

EDS :-(

tim

[1] Switzerland is top of my hit list, I think there are others.

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

People not from London can stop complaining too. Londoners deserve
cheaper fares, in fact we pay in part for the costs of the Underground
through our council tax so I'm perfectly happy to no longer subsidise
tourists and visitors who, for whatever reason, do not adopt Oyster.

OK. Would you like to pay higher fares on other cities' public
transport systems, such as the heavily-subsidised systems in German
cities, or indeed Merseyrail in Liverpool, which is the second
highest-subsidised per passenger mile national rail franchise in the
country, and I wouldn't be surprised if higher than LUL?

No, I didn't think so. Public transport is for the public, not just
for local people, though the actions of some provincial bus companies
(or more the inactions) may make you think otherwise.

In every case I can think of using foreign metro systems I have just bought

whatever ticket looked like the cheapest and the quickest to acquire and

haven't really researched all that much in to how the system works and

what is really the best option, as I would at home. I have no doubt I have

paid over the odds in many places. However I don't really care. The reason

for this is that when travelling on business my employer pays and not me

and when on holiday I just want to get from A to B with the least fuss.

I'm sure most infrequent tourists and visitors are much the same.

"Nick Cooper" wrote in
message ...
On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:02:39 +0200, "tim \(moved to sweden\)"
wrote:



IME most people have 2 weeks off at Xmas because their
employer gives them no choice.

Absolutely no people I know - and that cover a wide variety of jobs -
gets that. Just about the closest would be employers who shutdown
from XmD to NYD, which is only 8-10 days depending on when the
weekends fall, although of course 5-7 of those days are weekends or
bank holidays.

This is exactly right. I did not say they had to use 10 days
leave, but that they had a period of 2 weeks when the did
not go to work.

No-one is sensibly going to buy a monthly season on the 4th
of December as they will not be using it from 25th to the 1st
(and in many cases longer).

And most people take 2 (or more) weeks holiday in the
summer/easter when the kids are off school.

It may have escaped your notice, but there are more households in the
country _without_ children than those with.

They still take holidays in 'chunks'.

Also, not everyone takes
two-week holidays, kids or not.

Most do IME.

I guess if you work in retail (or hospitality) it's different, but
I would be suprised if almost every one else didn't fit the above.

I would suggest that if you work in just about every sector it's
different., and that you're just wrong.

I work in an 'office' environment and have done so for
20 years. Almost everone in the office takes a consecutive
holiday break.

tim

"Nick Cooper" wrote in
message ...
On Fri, 07 Oct 2005 08:31:59 +0100, U n d e r a c h i e v e r
wrote:

On 4/10/05 8:39 pm, in article
.com, "Mizter T"
wrote:

in cash single fares on the Tubes and buses, but the BBC News story
story contains the critical information on how to avoid these fares
increases. And that is to ***get an Oyster card and start using the Pre
Pay system to pay for single fares on the Tubes and buses***.

It is that simple.

Not if you get on the bus and find you are out of credit.

How is this different from getting on a bus and finding you are out of
money?

Because I can check first.

Remind me. Where do I get one of these Oyster credit
checkers to keep in my pocket?

tim