Neil Williams wrote:

On 2016-03-04 12:21:41 +0000, Paul Corfield said:

Oh come on. There is a cost to effectively reducing fares for
people.

There is - it is an increase for others so that people are
effectively sharing the cost more reasonably rather than some being
penalised twice.

It's a not unduly complicated calculation, and should be possible to
obtain from the Oyster data to establish what the new, slightly
higher transfer fare should be.

I suspect users would rather keep their services
even if they had to pay a bit more to do so.

Once again, I am not suggesting a cut to the income from the bus
network. I am simply suggesting dividing it by the number of users
making a point to point journey, rather than by the numbers making a
single-bus journey. You could extrapolate to those using
bus+Tube+bus or similar.

It's just a case of - take the income TfL requires, divide it by the
number of end to end journeys made, and that gives you your fare.
You may want to scale it by zone, but that's not hard maths.

Yes, some will whine, but *overall it will be fairer*. It will open
up opportunities across the network for people who can all of a
sudden afford to use it as what it is - a network. And you will be
able to save a load of money and make the network easier to use
overall by removing pointless duplication. You'll even make
everything operationally easier in the event of disruption - no
faffing about with transfer tickets, no making sure everyone gets the
right onward bus - if a bus terminates short, it's simply a
connection, and it costs nowt. If you have to transfer from Tube to
bus, because the Tube is not running, touch in on the bus - free,
it's a connection. Easy.

That depends how you define "fair". You could equally say that it is
unfair that a journey of a few stops would cost the same as a a three
bus journey from one side of London to the other.

Peter Smyth