--- Paul Corfield said...


All that would happen would be that fares would rise
overall to deal with the mileage and related cost that you
cling to as some sort of justification for adopting point to
points. In the case of NR fares almost all PTPs are far
more expensive than the Tube equivalent.

IIRC even before the zones were introduced, the old British Rail fares
were more still more expensive than the equivalent Tube fares.

But yes, there are oddities and overpricings in the current NR system,
but I still believe that in theory *a* point-to-point system could
become the fairest possible system. Just not the one that NR are using
at the moment!


But there is no justification at all for differentiating fares
like this on an urban railway system.

It seems justified to me. It gives consumers a fair choice with
different prices for different types of service. What's wrong with
that?

To use your theoretical basis Turnham Green would have
to have two sets of fares to everywhere to deal with the fact
that for a tiny part (early and late) of the day super fast
Piccadilly Line trains stop. These are traditionally off peak
times when fares would be cheaper but in your version they
would be more expensive than the slow chug along District
Line which provides the service at the height of the peak
- the most expensive time of the day. Lunacy!

The off-peak Piccadilly fares would be more expensive than the off-peak
District fares, but not necessarily more expensive than the peak
District fares.

(BTW apologies to anyone in years to come who found that sentence while
searching Google Groups for "the Peak District". Search engines are
annoying, aren't they?)

Whether you like it or not I cannot envisage the day when a zonal
basis for fares in London will be abolished.

Unfortunately, I can't realistically envisage them being abolished
either. But it doesn't stop me believing they should be.