London Banter - View Single Post - No incentive to travel off-peak on London Buses from January

Neil Williams · December 14th 06, 10:36 AM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote:

But simultaneously TfL are ending the Oyster Pay As You Go price
differential between peak and off-peak travel on the buses. Why are
they contradicting their policy to incentivise encourage off-peak
travel? Wasn't one of the reasons for introducing Oyster the ease with
which it handles this differential pricing?

It probably made little difference. One of the things about Oyster and
other pre-paid schemes (like the Dutch Strippenkaart) is that you tend
to just stick 20 quid on and forget about it, so your average user
won't notice whether a bus journey costs 80p or a quid as much as they
would if they were handing the cash over.

This has a nice feature that people are (psychologically) more likely
to do odd one-off journeys by public transport than if cash was paid,
in a similar way that credit cards don't feel as much like spending
real money as cash does.

Neil