On 17 Sep, 06:03, Walter Briscoe wrote:
In message
s.com of Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:16:19 in uk.transport.london, MIG
writes

[snip]

People are getting all hung up about the river, but the much more
serious and sinister issue is that this is paving the way for the
abolition of travelcards and the restoration (already under way) of
point to point fares calculated by formulas not available to the
public.

I wonder what you mean. I can think of Watford Junction peculiarities
and the difference between the printed and web versions of the two "Your
guide to fares and tickets ..." documents. The printed version says: "If
the time between touching in and touching out exceeds two and a half
hours you will be charged more than the Oyster single fare for your
journey." The actual time budget can now be as low as 70 minutes. I have
also seen suggestions that there will be no consistency between
Underground and National Rail fares when Pay As You Go is rolled out.
Do you refer to anything else?

Moving back to the map; it shows Marylebone to Bayswater via the TWO
Edgware Road stations as a reasonable route - an OSI between them would
make it slightly less unreasonable. Currently, that trip is ticketed as
TWO journeys. (I DO know a walk between Marylebone and Edgware Road
(subsurface) is more reasonable in that trip

I assume a continuing contract means IKEA has the right to dominate Tube
map posters - I would happily lose IKEA's yellow strip.

I find the new maps so much worse than the old that I wonder
"conspiracy?". I can't think who wins. The Mayor might think CUI BONO,
but is too bright to say so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono
--
Walter Briscoe

Well, the thing is (in answer to Mizter T as well) that "conspiracy"
doesn't really consist of Blofeld and the rest sitting round a table
and planning to be evil.

It's more about how people will put more effort into things that fit
into their preferred vision for the future and less effort into things
that don't, and also cooperate with others who turn out to be thinking
the same way.

More importantly, they will do or approve things which happen to be
consistent with their preferred future, even if they have no active
plans for getting there.

So Boris, ie the Tories, undoubtedly prefers a future where fares can
be raised without it being blatantly obvious. Point to point PAYG
fares are much easier to raise in subtle ways by recalculations and so
on without appearing to be across-the-board increases (and without
people even noticing what they are paying with autotopup etc).

I'm quite sure that they have no actual plan for how they on Earth
they can just abolish zones and travelcards and raise fares, but I
also think that they'd love to have that situation. This map is just
one little logical building block that's consistent with that vision.