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

Colin Rosenstiel · **New fares from 2 January 2006 - pdf**

In article ,
(Paul Corfield) wrote:

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.

Presumably there are better facilities at those airports than at
Heathrow then? As for Gatwick or Stansted...

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I'll confess to being somewhat out of date but I thought that the new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 last tried this in 2002 so you may be right that things are better
now. There was supposed to be a facility to buy National Rail tickets in
the airport then but it was in terminal 3 when I'd arrived elsewhere and
it was a single APTIS machine that had been away for repairs for three
weeks at that point.

In any case I was told there was no fare to Cambridge, except via SWT
and the bus to Feltham(?).

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.

I just don't want rip-off rates for cash tickets. The present
differential is perfectly acceptable.

--
Colin Rosenstiel