But surely all you would need to do is to set other fares to
compensate? IMO this should have been factored in when they designed
the system: it's what most European systems do, and you can still get
transfare tickets in Newcastle, for example.

In any case, I am sure a lot of people will be making decisions based
on the cost. If travelling on the journey I gave as an example, I
would currently change at TCR for the Northern Line. If I could use
the bus for free, I would change at Holborn for a bus as I usually
reckon this is quicker. So no additional usage.

On Sat, 6 Dec 2008 04:09:20 -0800 (PST),
wrote:


But surely all you would need to do is to set other fares to
compensate? IMO this should have been factored in when they designed
the system: it's what most European systems do, and you can still get
transfare tickets in Newcastle, for example.

Fares in London are currently hugely different between bus, tube and
rail. We need to be clear what we are talking about. I thought Neil was
referring to bus to bus interchange - if you allow the second journey
for free then that loss of revenue has to be funded somehow. If you
talking about bus to tube / rail or the reverse then fare scales are
very different indeed with tube / rail being zonal and bus being flat.
You could create a further fare scale that allowed through travel at one
price but there'd still be a discount over today's structure that would
have to be funded. I doubt it would be very popular if all the other
fares rose in order to create this structure.

The system was specified to allow single journey through ticketing - I
wrote the spec! Whether it was actually implemented in the design I do
not know as I changed jobs. Tyne and Wear is a different case
altogether - the original scheme was fully zonal and fares on Metro,
Ferry and Bus were common throughout Tyne and Wear prior to
deregulation. They had to be in order for the bus and metro integration
scheme to work. There were spin offs in that bus to bus transfer was
possible but only if you paid for a single (or more) zones. There were
short hop fare stages under the 1 Zone fare which meant some short
journeys involving a change might still be cheaper without a Transfare.
Post deregulation the scheme became "commercial" which stripped out bus
to bus interchange immediately, removed a lot of suburban interchange
points and narrowed the scheme to defined interchanges with the
objective being to reach Newcastle, Gateshead or Sunderland centres. The
only remnants left that still work as per the original scheme are routes
from Heworth to Washington and beyond where commercial bus services
still terminate at Heworth rather than run through to Newcastle.
Recently the honeycomb zone structure has been abandoned in favour of a
strange three zone structure for Transfares but the old limitations
remain.

In some cases there is operator specific through ticketing -
particularly from local services to the express routes that run from
Newcastle (Stagecoach 100) or Gateshead (Go Ahead X66) to the
Metrocentre. Go Ahead are experimenting with other types of through
tickets but that's only because they are breaking the bus network up
into a different structure and introducing connecting services in some
places.

In any case, I am sure a lot of people will be making decisions based
on the cost. If travelling on the journey I gave as an example, I
would currently change at TCR for the Northern Line. If I could use
the bus for free, I would change at Holborn for a bus as I usually
reckon this is quicker. So no additional usage.

If you were to reduce people's transport costs then typically you will
see an increase in ridership. Service quality is also a factor. Why else
do you imagine London's bus network has seen extraordinary growth over
the last few years?

Similar trends apply with rail services.
--
Paul C