London Banter - View Single Post - New fares from 2 January 2006

Paul Corfield · **New fares from 2 January 2006 - pdf**

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:02 +0100 (BST), (Colin
Rosenstiel) wrote:

In article ,
(TKD) wrote:

I don't follow. Who is "outside" the group of people that are
permitted to hold Oyster Cards? As I understand it anyone can have a
card.

Anyone not buying tickets often enough to bother to pay the £3 deposit,
learn how to use the card and remember how much credit is on the card
when they come to use it again 6 months later, for starters. I.e. many
people living outside London who can't get through tickets including the
tube.

I'm sure you will declare me a nutter but I have a HK Octopus card. I've
paid my deposit years ago and dipped into it many times - Octopus allows
negative value for one trip. It takes approximately 2 minutes to go to
the desk, get its status checked and reset if necessary [1] and value
added at HK International Airport. I have encountered no problems
whatsoever with doing this. Similarly I retain a RATP Mobilis card to
allow me to purchase one day tickets when I go to Paris.

Or people arriving at airports who can't buy through tickets to NSE
destinations. I can buy a ticket from Cambridge to Heathrow but not from
Heathrow to Cambridge.

I'll confess to being somewhat out of date but I thought that the new
TOMs at LUL stations had a much enhanced range of NSE destinations. I
would have thought Cambridge would be one such option. I also thought
National Rail had a ticket counter somewhere within Heathrow to deal
with the passengers who use the Rail Air link services and could
therefore sell through tickets.

I have to say that I really don't understand what form of ticketing
system you want. You repeatedly moan like hell about what exists today
saying that little or none of it works for you. Would you like an Oyster
card that would work in, to and from Cambridge or do you want Oyster
thrown in the bin and paper tickets retained?

[1] the card tracking system will lock you out of the system if there is
a very long gap in usage which there can be in my case as I typically
only go to HK once a year.
--
Paul C

Admits to working for London Underground!