The 2016 Fare Announcement

1. It would also appear that Tfl are having their “expenditure” (but not their “capital investment” ) guvmint grant cut – eventually to zero.
   Only the “FT” has this at the moment that I can see – & that will be behind a paywall ….
   Can someone else provide more complete/accurate information, please?

2. Can someone else provide more complete/accurate information, please?

   We’ll look to do a full post on this once more information is available, because it’s a topic that absolutely deserves to be delved into in its own right. In the meantime I’m keen to avoid speculation here, so if folks could avoid doing so about it on this post I’d be grateful.

3. Living in East Village E20 as I do, I’m really pleased about the three Stratford stations moving into Zone 2/3 from Zone 3. Seems to be good news for Star Lane, Abbey Road, West Ham and Canning Town too.

   Not that it saves MASSIVE amounts of money – the Zone 2 and 3 combined and separate daily limits are the same.

   The HS1 line at Stratford International is really weird. The lower Oyster/PAYG fares apply as long as you go though the ticket barriers (but not exit) before 0635, after 0926 and before 1605 and after 1856. Oyster singles are £3.80 low and £5.40.

   But if you get a paper ticket the lower fares start at 1000am and apply for the rest of the day. Here it’s £6 each way but £10.80 return but £7.60 off peak return.

   So you get get a return for £7.60 non-PAYG if you leave after 10am, the same as Oyster unless you return between 1605 and 1856 when Oyster would be £9.20

   Clear, eh?

4. There doesn’t seem to be any official ‘evidence’, as yet, that the existing stations on the zone 2/3 boundary (which also include North Greenwich) are going to be moved wholly into zone 2. As it is feasible for a station to be in two zones, there doesn’t appear to be any reason that the four existing zone 2/3 stations in that area should move. It would, however, make the maps rather interesting in that area! Perhaps overlapping in a ‘West End’ and ‘City’ zone style…?

5. Related to the TfL fares announcement (as it seems TfL are footing the bill) – free child travel on National Rail in London has also been announced:
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34791332

6. @ Matt E Raffles – that’s a perfectly fair remark about the zone boundary stations. I made an assumption and it looks as if I was wrong to do so based on comments made elsewhere. If the current Z23 boundary stations don’t move It’s going to create a rather bizarre north south and east west aligned zonal boundary. Clearly it’s possible to have several stations on a boundary – happens on DLR – but it’s usually aligned on one geographical axis.

   Apologies to readers and JB for the error on my part.

7. All Tramlink stations are notionally in the same zone, although for other purposes Wimbledon is in Zone3, Mitcham Junction, Beckenham Junction and Elmers End in Zone 4 and Croydon in Zone 5, so there is a precedent for a boundary between zones to have width.

   I notice that with the latest fare increases the premium for living south of the river and travelling to Zone 1 has now risen past 50% (peak) and 70% (off peak)
   Zone 1 to 6 TfL £5.10 peak, £3.10 off peak (frozen)
   Zone 1 to 6 NR* £7.70 peak, £5.30 off peak (increase of 10p)
   premium 51% peak, 71% off peak

   *unless travelling to/from a few “London terminals”, in which case the surcharge is “only” about 20%

   If you don’t pass through zone 1 the markup is even larger.
   Zone 2 to Zone 6 off peak TfL £1.50; NR £2.70, – 80% more expensive.

8. Good news for Dartford – pre-“Oysterisation”, peak travelcard was (and still is if you’re mad) £21.80. Daily cap became £20.00 once Oyster arrived. Next year it will be £15.20. Nice.

9. Wonder why the Zip Oyster requirement for kids on NR – if they can determine the adult’s journey origin with Oyster or paper tickets, they should be able to assume the same for any accompanying child.

   Bit rough on tourists and families visiting from elsewhere in the UK, as the ID & photo requirements mean you can’t get a Zip Oyster on the spur of the moment.

10. Oops – ignore my comment above…I skim read the main article!

11. @Hilltopper – perhaps something deliberate to avoid subsidising visitors?

12. In the fares pdf, top of page 5 :
    1 inc Z1 590
    1 exc Z1 490
    What does that mean?
    And why are some child fares “5p less when sold at LU ticket offices or machines”?

13. Perhaps a better description of what are often described as “zone boundary stations” might be “stations which are in both zones”. So these could be arranged in any pattern, with or without “width” (which is in any case an elusive concept when you are talking about a finite number of points [stations] rather than a partition of an area of ground).

    My grounds for supposing that Pudding and its friends are continuing to be in both zones is that if they are not, it amounts to a fare rise for certain journeys. Of course fares can and do rise, but one would expect this to be spelled out in one of the documents, rather than just slithering in as an unexpected side-effect of something else. (Or would one be considered a bit naïve for expecting this?).

14. Not 100% sure what this means for Southeastern oyster prices given what it says earlier in the article about some NR being frozen but then there’s this: “The National Rail PAYG tariff sees increases for both peak and off peak travel. Fares increase by 10p for all zone combinations.”

    Does that really mean another 10p increase for say, zone 1-4 trips, or even short zone 4-zone 4 trips (eg Woolwich Dockyard to Greenwich), as that’s another 5-10% increase on the previous year, with SE London shafted again, as it’s been 5-10% each year for about 5 years now while much of London gets less.

15. @Dave Russell
    “why are some child fares “5p less when sold at LU ticket offices or machines”?”

    An odd one that. It can’t be because they don’t have to pay Brian Souter and his ilk for handling them, because it is only certain fares that get that treatment. However, the fares in question are the only ones that are odd multiples of 5p, so it could be that LU machines cannot handle 5p pieces?

    “1 inc Z1 590
    1 exc Z1 490
    What does that mean?”

    Most fares depend not only on the number of zones you pass through, but also whether those zones inc(lude) Zone 1. So in that table “3 inc Z1” means zones 1,2 and 3, whereas “3excZ1” means , for example, zones 2,3,and 4 or zones 4,5, and 6.

    “1 exc Z1” means a journey entirely within one of zones 2 to 5.
    “1 inc Z1” is a slightly quirky way of describing any journey entirely within Zone 1 .

    These are the fares for journeys including both TfL and NR elements. Allowing for the fact that, within Zone 1 , Thameslink and the NCL both charge TfL fares, the only place you can do a journey with an NR element entirely within Zone 1 is
    Vauxhall/Charing Cross- Waterloo-London Bridge-Cannon Street, and even that is not possible at present as there are no direct trains between Waterloo and London Bridge.

16. Ed – yes I think it does.

17. Ed
    The SE franchise was set an RPI+5% revenue basket target for at least the first 5 years of its existence, as fares per mile beforehand were on average lower than elsewhere in the London area. I believe that +5% process continues. This is separate to the +20%/+30% fares uplift target for HS1 premium pricing. What is interesting isn’t that passenger numbers haven’t been rising as fast in SE land as elsewhere (no surprise there) but that passengers have nevertheless gone up in most cases, to the point that a further order for HS1 trains is on the cards.

18. @ed
    That is exactly what it means.
    See annex A1
    http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/MD1562%20Fares%20PDF_0.pdf

    It’s not just SE London – it’s almost everyone south of the river. (* only three TOCs still charge NR fares. TSGN (most routes) , SET, and SWT)

    Short distance NR journeys do cost more, but journeys into Zone 1 cost about the same, provided you don’t switch to the Underground (which will add a 40% to 50% premium) or start in Zone 6 (which costs about 20% more than a Z1-6 Tube journey if you stick to NR, and between 50% and 70% more if your destination is not the London terminal.

    The biggest premium of all is for an off peak journey from Zone 2 to Zone 6.
    Tube only is £1.50 (e.g Earls Court to Heathrow) . Use a train for any part of your journey (e.g Earls Court to Feltham*) and it’s £2.70 (80% more)

    yes, I know Feltham isn’t south of the river, but it is served by SWT and you have to cross the river (twice) to get there. It is the closest NR station to Heathrow.

    PAYG peak
    Zone 1-4 Underground £3.90 NR £3.90 both £5.50
    within Zone 4 Underground £1.70 (frozen) NR £2 both £2

    Zone 1-4 Underground £2.80 NR £2.80 both £4.30
    within Zone 4 Underground £1.50 (frozen) NR £1.80 both £1.80

19. RPI is Retail Price Index, Ed: ‘one’ measure of inflation in the UK

20. @LBM – *one* of the inflation measures. Politicians also use the CPI (Consumer Prices Index) and TPI (Taxes and Prices Index) when it suits them.

    [Thanks, I shall note it in the Compendium. LBM]

21. A better comparison
    Rainham and Erith, facing each other across the river, are both in Zone 6. But because C2C charges TfL rates, it costs Erithites 23% more than their opposite number in Rainham to get to the City (Fenchurch Street/Cannon Street), 71% more to get to Oxford Circus, and 80% more to get to Zone 2 (e.g Canary Wharf)

    Peak hour the respective premiums are 20%, 51% and 46%

    (all figures are based on the new 2016 fares, the discrepancies are actually getting bigger, as TfL fares have been frozen but NR fares have not)

22. The rezoning of Stratford will raise eyebrows in SW London where there has been a long standing (and so unsuccessful) campaign to rezone Surbiton into Z5.

23. @James. The eyebrow-raising could, I suppose, be of a negative kind (“why do they get it and we don’t”), or perhaps positive (“now that they’ve got it, perhaps our turn will come”).

24. Briantist
    Because I’m lazy … will “geriatric’s pass” apply KGX-Stratford-in-the-hole or not?

25. @ Ed – Timbeau’s given chapter and verse on fare details but the quick answer is that South Eastern trips are on the NR tariff and fares are going up 10p.

    Hopefully I’m not going to be teaching you to “suck eggs” but here’s a quick explanation of tariffs. There are four PAYG tariffs which apply to different parts of the rail network and depending on the journey you are making.

    TfL – covers all trips on LU, DLR, “original” Overground and a number of NR routes (largely north of the Thames).
    TfL (West Anglia and Shenfield) – covers trips on the West Anglia and Shenfield lines and to / from those lines to stations covered by the TfL tariff.
    National Rail – covers all trips on South Eastern, Southern, SWT and parts of Thameslink (north of West Hampstead and south of Elephant and Castle) and Great Northern (north of F Park). It also covers journeys where you change from Overground services to NR services but not via Zone 1 (e.g Brondesbury to Elstree and Borehamwood or Wapping to Bexleyheath via New Cross).
    National Rail / TfL Through Journeys – where a journey involves travel from stations on South Eastern / Southern / Thameslink bits (as above) / SWT / Great Northern on to the TfL network *or* across Zone 1 using TfL services and then using another National Rail service.

    Journeys covered by the last tariff are subject to a Z1 “add on” charge. Journeys covered by the TfL or TfL West Anglia / Shenfield tariff do NOT incur the “add on” charge. This is probably one of the most irksome aspects of travel costs for people travelling from South London and into Zone 1 on the tube or even on the Thameslink core (which is priced as if it’s a LU line).

    In writing this answer I was pondering what might happen when Crossrail opens to Abbey Wood. Based on what’s been said to date the TfL tariff will apply for Crossrail journeys. This leaves me wondering whether South Eastern may need to make the route from Abbey Wood into Zone 1 on the TfL tariff to give equivalence regardless of route. This is just me musing.

26. @ Greg – no Freedom Pass acceptance on HS1, KX to Sfd Int.

27. @WW: Whether or not Ed needed your handy tariffs reminder, I appreciated it, and so, probably, did others. Thank you.

28. @WW
    “This leaves me wondering whether South Eastern may need to make the route from Abbey Wood into Zone 1 on the TfL tariff to give equivalence regardless of route..”
    I doubt it – there are two fares from places like Lewisham, Croydon or Richmond to Zone 1, depending on whether you use NR or DLR/Overground/Undergound (respectively)

    @james
    “long standing (and so unsuccessful) campaign to rezone Surbiton into Z5”
    The latest episode in this decade-long saga was reported in today’s Surrey Comet, as the new MP takes up where his predecessor left off. The sticking point, however will remain the imperative that SWT musn’t lose money on the deal. (It would apparently cost them £6m p.a – I think that’s for Surbiton and Kingston together). As the local view is that neither station should have been in Zone 6 in the first place – no other station that close to central London is in Zone 6, and many are in Zone 4 – that equates to over £100m that SWT have overcharged us already since they took over the franchise. But no, apparently their revenue stream is sacrosanct.
    In have even had SWT’s senior management tell me that they couldn’t re-zone Kingston because it wouldn’t be “fair” on whoever they rezoned the other way to balance it out. The possibility of not overcharging anyone was obviously beyond his comprehension.

    (This was the same manager who claimed SWT did not have a monopoly because there are river services – as I write the next boat to Central London from Kingston will be at about 1pm: on May 22nd: and requires a change at Richmond (as the Hampton Court to Westminster boats don’t call at Kingston): and gets to Westminster Pier after the last boat back has left.

    Not really much use for commuting

29. The re-zoning of the Stratford Stations to Zone 2/3 is a great idea to reduce peoples travel costs i have the following question

    With the building of the new Northern Line extension to Battersea Power Station now in progress why is Battersea Station being classed in Zone 1 ?

    Kennington is Zone 2/3, Nine Elm will be Zone 2, but the terminus Zone 1.

    The bus stops directly outside the new station and all along the river side to Vauxhall are Zone 2 as are the adjecent National Rail stations at Battersea Park and Queenstown Road.

    This smacks of nothing but a revenue grabbing exercise, it will do nothing to help any of the current local community access the Northern Line unless willing to pay an elevated fare, the only local people able to afford those fares will be those moving into the multi million pound developements over the station

30. Pure (inspired) guesswork, but my money’s on the zoning of the new Northern Line Battersea Power Station station being based on the overall financing of the extension (including its effect on other routes).
    There is previous for this – the renewed ELL dipping into Zone 1 at Shoreditch High Street for precisely this reason.

31. @ Bren – not sure you’ve got the zoning proposals for the Battersea extension correct. The paper below sets out the plans as I understand them.

    http://www.persona.uk.com/nle/D-Proofs/TFL87.PDF

    This puts Kennington in Z12 and the new stations in Zone 1. The existing NR stations at Battersea will remain in Zone 2. It is impossible to say what zone a bus stop is in because there are no bus fare zones. TfL removed fare zone stickers on bus stops a long, long time ago.

    The paper makes it perfectly clear that the main criteria about the zoning proposals are to create the impression of the developed area being part of Zone 1. This is part of attracting investment and no doubt pushing up land values, rents etc. There is a debate to be had whether fare zones should be used as a pseudo development tool to skew the attractiveness (or not) of an area. The apparent willingness of the current Mayor to do this and to further use TfL as a pseudo development and housing agency perhaps shows weaknesses in City Hall’s organisation and statutory powers. The apparent lack of active consideration of affordability of transport seems to betray a certain mindset too. I blame the estate agents – they over emphasise the zonal location and apparent travel times from developments to Zone 1 in order to boost demand for new flats and houses. The world’s gone mad off the back of a hopelessly skewed property market and it’ll take years / decades to solve the madness (if anyone’s got the will to try!).

32. Great news about the Stratford stations becoming multi zonal. I wonder though if something can’t be done about the ridiculous situation with Shoreditch High Street station. Surely it ought to be a zones 1&2 station? I find it highly annoying, as a holder of a zone 2&3 travelcard, that I have to pay an extention fare each time I travel along the line and pass through Shoreditch, and I can’t be the only one. So are we likely to see a change here anytime soon?…

33. @Kevin L. Probably not, because Shoreditch High Street was deliberately put in zone 1 precisely to bring in more fare money than would otherwise have been collected. Giveaways like the Stratford rezoning only occur about once per decade, if that.

34. @Kevin L
    But if Shoreditch was in Zone 2 (no point in being 1/2 if the stations either side are in Zone 2) they would get less money from you, and that wouldn’t be “fair” would it (see my comments on SWT’s attitude to rezoning above)
    Indeed, the only reason Shoreditch was in Zone 1 in the first place was because Southern would lose too much revenue if all its London Bridge passengers from the Forest Hill and Peckham lines started to use Shoreditch instead.
    I can’t believe Nine Elms would be zone 2 if the stations either side were Zone 1 – it would effectively put Battersea PS in Zone 2 anyway, because anyone using it would have to pass through 9Elms, and thus pay a Z12 fare.
    It would not be the only example of a direct journey that takes you from Zone x to zone x+1 and back in again – e.g Twickenham to Wimbledon – but it would be the only one where you have no choice!
    Buses haven’t been zoned for at least ten years.

35. After the outrageous hikes to Z1-6 travelcard prices last year, a %1 rise is trivial. My response from Orpington has been to stop using the tube/bus on weekdays, walking from the London NR terminals, and only travelling further afield on weekends when I can get a Network Card discount.

    Its not been taking much longer, journey times are more predictable (especially for evening buses) and I get more exercise. TFL’s revenue from me has dropped, but I suppose they are grateful I’m not contributing to their record tube riderships.

    Have other people changed their travel patterns after last year’s changes?

36. @John B
    I switched from Travelcard to point-to-point some years ago, when I realised that is was often quicker to walk from Waterloo than get the bus or the Drain. And these days I usually Boris bikes instead.
    I have an Oyster for those days when it is too wet or have a heavy bag, although it is surprising how much of central London is within a few minutes walk of a station at which a “London Terminals” season ticket is valid.

    Eyewatering as point-to-point season prices are from the outer darkness that is Zone 6, they are a bargain next to Travelcards.

    The only thing that sticks in the craw is that some of my money goes to fund Mr Souter’s shareholders and political campaigns, instead of being invested in the transport infrastructure – following the Enterprise Rail dodgy-dealing story revealed how the money from Travelcards is apportioned, I was always careful to renew my Travelcards at a Tube station with no NR services, to ensure TfL got as big a share of the revenue as possible.

37. @timbeau – not sure that buying your Travelcard at an LU rather than mainline station will necessarily achieve what you want. Unless the apportionment rules have changed recently, the Travelcard revenue is pooled and then divided between LU and franchised operators, with the balance between the two something like 60:40 in favour of LU in Z1-3 and contrarywise elsewhere. It’s the product and zone that matter rather than the station ownership. This was, as I have recounted before, the basis of the scam on which the LTS MBO fell – and why the fools’ codename for their scam was “Lots of money for LTS”.

38. @ Timbeau – I agree with Graham H’s view about apportionment. From memory the only thing you may be depriving someone of is ticket sales commission and even then that’s not going to be material. Your PTP season will be shoving an awful lot of cash flow through SWT with, I suspect, only a bit of shared revenue with Southern / TSGN for the Clapham Junction / Wimbledon interchange and alternative route possibilities to London Terminals (assuming your season is not route restricted).

39. Yes, I realise that the revenue from a P2P bought at an SWT in its monopoly area will almost all go to the Stagecoach coffers. But a Travelcard bought from an LU station in Z1 (e.g Chancery Lane) will, as you say, direct more revenue to TfL than one bought from an SWT station in Zone 6 – although whether that is because of the Zone or the operator I am not sure now.

    The LTS fiddle was selling Fenchurch Street Travelcards (Zone 1, but TOC only) at Upminster (Zone 6, served by TOC and LU). If it was the zone that mattered, surely they would have been doing the opposite?

40. @timbeau – forget the operator, think zone! The LTS scam was selling Fenchurch Travelcards at Fenchurch St (theoretical take for LTS 40%) but then running them through Upminster’s books (actual LTS take 60%).

41. @Graham H – forget zones, think operator[s using that station]!

    The reason the costs were so allocated was because that Fenchurch St was LTS only so it was presumed that the bulk of the journey was done on LTS so 60%. Upminster was served by both the District line and LTS so there was a presumption that some people buying Travelcards wouldn’t actually be LTS uses at all – hence the different proportioning.

    Note: who “owns” the station is irrelevant.

42. @PoP -yes,that’s the point I’m trying to get across: station ownership is irrelevant. Your remarks do, however,imply a shift in the apportionment key. When Travelcard was extended to include the then BR services,there was no differentiation by route. It was a simple anything sold in 1-3, wherever it was sold and regardless of who sold it, was split 60:40 one way; in zones 2-6, the split was reversed. Any local circumstances were ignored and assumed to be resolved in the swings and roundabouts of numerous individual cases. [We could take that lordly view then, as it was all in the public sector and any errors could be resolved in the respective settlements for the two operators concerned; of course, on privatisation, the split became set in stone]. It is certainly the case that c2c management will argue the case for a bigger share of the “BR” pot, as all the TOCs do, but that is, of course, a different issue.

43. Graham H,

    I am only going by my memories of how it was reported at that time (Sunday Times I think but maybe Modern Railways). So it may be that the formula was more generalised but what I read gave the impression that it was down to station level. But if you recall otherwise I suspect that you are correct.

44. @PoP – It may be station level now but at the time, no one cared….

45. Thanks for the explanations of fare differences. Depressing to see yet more 5-10% increases in SE London. Highest in the entire country?

    I knew there were differences but that Erith / Purfleet comparison is stark. Huge difference – I know a lot of people don’t pay fares in SE London, and looking at that who can blame them, if they are treated like that.

46. @pop / Graham H

    I call as my next witness Christian Wolmar, who is usually reliable in these matters

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fraud-investigation-casts-doubt-over-rail-line-sell-off-1317502.html
    [ignore the Oct 2011 dateline, some error in the Independent’s archiving, as all old articles carry that Oct 2011 dateline: this article is clearly contemporary with the events of early 1996]
    “Tickets issued at Fenchurch Street were sold at Upminster because LTS gets a greater proportion of the revenue from Travelcard sales, which has to be shared with London Transport. Yesterday it emerged that there were plans to extend the scheme to Barking, which would have resulted in a doubling of the extra annual revenue to over £1m”

    and again, probably the next day
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/rail-sale-scuppered-by-fraud-probe-1317983.html
    “Large numbers of season tickets with a London Transport Travelcard element were printed off at Fenchurch Street in central London and sold at Upminster in east London. This was advantageous to LTS because the company gets a greater proportion of revenue from tickets issued at Fenchurch Street than it does at Upminster”

    Whether by a whsitleblower or a routine audit history does not record, but it was apparently uncovered on the Thursday afternoon, with little more than 48 hours before handover.
    It was perhaps fortunate for the people concerned that it was uncovered when it was still “just” one nationalised industry cheating on another (the return of London Transport to municipal control was still four years in the future), and no-one had yet gained personally from it.

47. @ed
    I lit upon the Erith/Purfleet comparison after a long search, because such comparisons are surprisingly difficult to find. One reason is because most Tube and Overground lines don’t actually penetrate Zone 6 (the Northern Line doesn’t, for example) and where they do, parallel NR lines are often on the TfL tariff (e.g West Drayton).

    A similar comparison appears between Feltham (the railhead for Heathrow for much of south west London) and Heathrow Central, but I chose the cross-Thames analogy both because the original comment was about SE London and because, although served by SWT, Feltham isn’t actually “south of the river”.
    (Somehow “South of the great South West Road (A4/A30)” – the Roman Road to Staines – doesn’t have quite the same ring)

48. @timbeau – unlike Mr Wolmar, I was the Board’s investigating officer for the event. Of course, LTS got more money by selling tickets of which 60% should have gone to LU and of which they got only 40%. However, because the income was mediated through theTravelcard pool, the actual gain for LTS was heavily diluted . As far as I could tell, that had never ocurred to the LTS management; they were naive in the extreme (and not just on commercial matters either). For example, they believed that by pressing Delete all their emails about their scam just vanished; even the BTP knew better and so we read them…

    The events of that weekend were not quite asMr Wolmar describes but we – and No 10 – gave out only a sanitised version.

49. @Graham H

    I realise you were on the spot, which I why I was surprised at the discrepancy with the usually reliable Wolmar’s account. He may have been interpreting the LTS management’s understanding of what they were trying to achieve.

    But, whether it was accurate or not, it was on the strength of that information that I decided where to buy my Travelcards!

50. Ah,that’s what comes of believing what you read inthe press… Whenever I read an article in the newspapers, my first question is always “Why am I being told this” quickly followed by “And where did the info come from”

    The LTS management was exceedingly naive; in the run-up to privatisation, the long serving BR Commercial and Finance Directors were replaced with industry newcomers. As the shadow Franchise Director responsible for setting up the business as a free-standing entity, I had to work closely with these people, alas. Their Board meetings were characterised by periodic greedy discussions about the precise model of BMW that they might acquire once privatised*. It was a mark of their naivete that the MD emerged from the disciplinary interview with his Group MD in tears. The perpetrators were not prosecuted because it was felt that that would damage the whole privatisation process, although at a working level within the Board (and in ORR), the case seemed open and shut. The anger of the LT Chairman was also something to behold. The whole affair was deliberately hushed up and stage managed by No10 and I’m not surprised that Christian Wolmar saw only the shiny tip of the iceberg.

    I cannot now recall the LTS turnover, let alone its income from Travelcard = perhaps £20/70m? I also seem to recall that Travelcard distribution key gave LTS something like 13% of the BR share of the pot (but I wouldn’t go to the wall for that figure). 20% of 13 % is a very small slice of £20m, isn’t it? Rearrange the following words to form a wellknown phrase or saying: Candle worth game not was the the.

    *Given their Essex background, the colour would have had to be pink, presumably. TOWIE

51. @ Graham H – splendid stuff. 🙂 Which LT Chairman was it? Wikipedia suggests there is something of a gap in Chairman in the latter half of the 1990s. Was it Sir Malcolm Bates, LT Chairman, who blew his top? I could more readily imagine Sir Wilfred Newton “blowing his top” in quite splendid fashion but the few press articles about suggest he left LT in 1994 having failed to get a successor appointed because his candidate fell foul of HM Treasury.

52. @WW -I can’t now remember who was acting as LRT chairman at the time (the event fell squarely within the long interregnum after Newton retired, which maybe why the name didn’t stick)

53. Timbeau, re Shoreditch agreed that there’s no point in being in Z1/2 if the stations either side are in Z2, but isn’t Hoxton in Z1/2 rather than Z2?

54. Re Mike: As long as its closest interchange station, which is Whitechapel , is in zone 2, then travelling from Central London to Shoreditch High Street will *always* cross two zones.

    IMHO one might consider putting Whitechapel in Zone 1/2 while keeping SHS in Zone 1, to reduce fare from Central London to the area, but keeping most of everything else the same.

55. James @ 13 November 2015 at 17:40

    “The rezoning of Stratford will raise eyebrows in SW London where there has been a long standing (and so unsuccessful) campaign to rezone Surbiton into Z5.”

    Regional and national profile of Stratford also benefits Canning Town.

    The “Newham Recorder” coverage refers to savings to local passengers, as referred to by Briantist above. I think the main motivation is for Olympic Park visitors.

56. @Mike
    If Hoxton and SHS are both Z1/2, what should the fare between them be? £2.40 or £1.50?

    If the latter, they are both effectively in Zone 2 as you can’t get to them directly from any other Zone 1 station

57. Ed
    that Erith / Purfleet comparison
    Are they not the two areas that are not “town twinned” but do have a “suicide pact with each other”, according to one comedienne?

58. It’s no good, Graham
    YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIRS …..

59. Gatwick Express Oyster – there’s a separate gateline at Victoria for the Gatwick Express, so it will be quite straightforward to differentiate between passengers taking the stopper vs the express.

    Nine Elms etc – an interesting side-effect of zoning Battersea and Nine Elms as Zone 1 is that Vauxhall (which is closer to central London) will presumably need to be rezoned from Z1/2 to Z1, thereby ending the small discount commuters get for transferring from rail to tube there vs Waterloo.

60. @Mark. Not necessarily. Zones are not based strictly on “distance from central London” (which is anyway not well-defined). There are plenty of distance anomalies all over the zones.

    Of course, Vauxhall could be rezoned at any time, to bring in more money, and Nine Elms could be used as an excuse if that were done.

61. @greg
    It was the late and sadly lamented Erithite Linda Smith who said that her home town had a suicide pact, although she usually claimed it was with Dagenham rather than Purfleet
    (or indeed Rainham, which is the station I actually made comparison with because, unlike Purfleet but like Erith, it is both in Greater London and in Zone 6)

62. Very interesting WW – a couple of small typos in the Stratford section:
    “it has also seems that” and “For completeness this change means Pudding…stations entirely into Zone 2.”

63. Thank you Pincinerator,

    The subsequent addition of stations was not initially clear and so the text had been modified and modified text often gets mangled.

    I have taken the liberty of taking apart the offending paragraph and replacing it by two separate paragraphs that, hopefully, should make the situation quite explicit and free from grammatical errors. No doubt someone will point out if they are not.

64. To clarify on Northern line extension, the following is proposed:

    Kennington: zone 1/2
    Nine Elms: zone 1
    Battersea NLE: zone 1
    Battersea NR: zone 2
    Vauxhall: zone 1/2

65. @Flare: mapping that on the extended TfL map will be, errrm. …, “challenging”!!

66. I believe the word for that sort of thing is an enclave

67. Mark 15 Nov.

    There is a separate gate line for Gatwick Express trains at Victoria, but Southern* aren’t all that brilliant at putting the trains in the right platforms. So every once in a while a GEx will arrive in 15-19. Slightly less common, but still regular, is a peak hour Cat-Tat into platforms 13-14.

    *Well perhaps it’s Network Rail signallers, but I’m inclined, as a Southern user, not to give the company the benefit of the doubt.

68. @Malcolm

    Rezoning Vauxhall into Z1 would brings howls of protest from SWT commuters for whom the Battersea/Nine Elms stations have virtually no benefit.

69. Battersea Enclave:

    SWT commuters could get of at Queenstown Road Z2 or Southern BAttersea Park Z2 and get on the Northern line Battersea Z1 which surely effectively replicates the present Vauxhall situation Z1/2?

70. @ ngh – you seen to overlook that the service to Queens Road Battersea is limited to the Windsor lines stopping services and far more trains stop at Vauxhall so your suggestion has distinct limitations. The lure of the Victoria line connection at Vauxhall will I think continue unabated for SWT commuters.

71. Re Richard B,

    I know that very well but the Northern and Victoria largely go to different places even if there is some interchangeability between near by stations e.g. Oxford Circus and TCR (as well as some common stations like Euston).

    Queenstown Road is likely to get the disued platform brough back into use as part of the Waterloo throat & international rebuild and platform extensions (P1-4) use (unless it is deferred to later years by the Hendy review?).

72. @ ngh interesting that Queens Road may have old platforms recommissioned as I had also got the distinct impression that Network Rail would like to close Queens Road Battersea on the basis that passengers could change at Clapham Junction and go to Battersea Park instead.

    I confess, if what I thought was true, I always felt it was a misconceived notion and it will be good to see Queens Road refurbished.

73. I live just off Queenstown Road. Morning rush hour trains from National Rail stations are utterly rammed & almost no one gets off. So a 137 to Sloane Square and the District or Circle works well, as does changing onto the Picc at Knightsbridge. For a cheaper longer journey to the centre try an 87 or 77 along Wandsworth Road. Or a 344 along Battersea Park Road.

    @RichardB: Queens Road Battersea renamed Queenstown Road on 12 May 1980. Fully agree that travelling via CLJ to the centre from here makes no sense. Before it closed I also tried the VIC-LBG shuttle from Wandsworth Road; I got a seat but it took too long. LO does provide a cheap Z2 only route to the Wharf though.

74. @ ngh I suspect most of those on the Windsor lines wanting Northern line destinations in the West End will stay on to Waterloo. The Victoria line is excellent now. For the City, it’s the Drain or a brisk ~20 minute walk.

75. @Old Buccaneer Ah, that explains the extraneous “Peckham” in Queens Road Peckham!

76. @ngh You’re having a laugh! None of the mainline suburban trains even stop at QRB, and even if they did the trains are rammed. Not a sensible alternative even before you take account of the fact that the Victoria and Northern lines go different places.

    Rezoning Vauxhall into Z1 is simply not going to happen.

77. With stratford and some surrounding stations moving to zone 2/3, does it not make the case for wood street station moving to zone 3/4? This would better represent it’s geographic location. (wood street – Walthamstow)

78. Re James,

    My point was that the Vic and Northern largely go to different places. Any Windsor lines users who swap at Queenstown Road are virtually guaranteed a seat on the Northern Line at Battersea ( and achive the same saving as doing the equivalent at Vauxhall) needless to say they will get of the Northern at waterloo in the evenings as they do a thte moment. In the future the Windsor lines will have comapritively worse access to the tube at Waterloo as they move to the former international terminal platforms.
    Note I also said platform at Queenstown Road – Richard changed that to platforms.

    I’m not arguing for re-zoning after all the present situation equalises some of the cost benefits of living north of the river.

    However if TfL and the SW franchise are looking for extra revenue outside of ticket price increases at some point it wouldn’t be too hard…

79. @ Anon 0809 – whatever is happening at Stratford or Nine Elms has no bearing on rezoning in places like Wood St, Epsom, Surbiton or wherever. The latest rezonings are all to do with the relative attractiveness of large development schemes and nothing to do with transport or affordability for passengers. Wood St or Surbiton are very unlikely to get massive redevelopments laying waste [1] to acres of spare land. There are increasing calls from some quarters for the zonal system to be scrapped but I’ve yet to see a coherent proposal for what will replace it. Some people are citing Paris where Carte Orange / Navigo (season tickets) prices have been reduced by simply offering six zones for the price of 2. However the zones haven’t actually been scrapped. Quite how the Paris scheme is being funded, given season tickets are paid for by employers and employees, I don’t know. Any move to increase taxes in the UK would bring the pains on from all sorts of quarters and I can imagine a return to the nonsenses of Fares Fair where whatever a Mayor did was instantly countered by the DfT withdrawing TOC funding / demanding higher premia so no progress could be made. The mixed industry structure for rail operation in London with revenue risks held by various parties makes zone changes and revenue impacts very hard to deal with unless TfL is forking out loads of cash to the TOCs and DfT which I doubt is sustainable long term. Endless “money go rounds” don’t make a lot of sense and certainly should not straddle any new franchise starting. The revenue position should ideally be reset when a new franchise starts – therefore those arguing about Kingston, Surbiton and Epsom should really be kicking the doors down of their MPs, the DfT, Mayoral Candidates and Assembly members *now* to lobby for zone changes. Any change could then coincide with the new SWT franchise or first fares revision in its term.

    [1] other opinions about modern developments are available. 😉

80. @WW
    “therefore those arguing about Kingston, Surbiton and Epsom should really be kicking the doors down of their MPs, the DfT, Mayoral Candidates and Assembly members *now* to lobby for zone changes”
    It has been high on the agenda of successive MPs in Kingston and Surbiton for over a decade, but all have fetched up against the intransigent attitude of SWT which, if you strip away all the dissembling, amounts to the view that the terms of their franchise guarantees them the Zone 6 revenue.

81. @ Timbeau – yes I understand all that. All I am saying is that the earlier than expected reletting of the franchise provides an opportunity as does the upcoming Mayoral election to effect a change and have the revenue impact dealt with in a competitive bidding situation. In other words it is unlikely to be material to tweak a couple of zone locations for stns when set beside all the other costs and revenue issues. Addressing it as a stand alone issue allows the franchise holder to blow the implications out of proportion and they have zero incentive to do anything about it.

    I’d also argue that if the issue isn’t dealt with soon then you end up the revenue impacts of current zone locations being locked into the business case and evaluation of Crossrail 2. Given London apparently needs to fund at least 50% of CR2 then being “nice” about zones is very unlikely to ever happen because every last penny will have to be squeezed from fare payers.

    If those who are sufficiently agitated about the zoning issue do not use these upcoming opportunities and nothing then changes they have no one to blame but themselves.

82. @WW
    Indeed, the re-letting of the franchise may be a one-in-a-generation opportunity to get the zoning sorted out. Both local seats are marginal, but unfortuanetly there won’t be a general election in the offing in 2017. (There may be a by-election, but only if one of the sitting MPs succeeds in his campaign to become the next Mayor, in which case local constituency issues may have come off his radar) .

83. Given the above comments about zoning, it might be interesting to take the Zones information from http://blog.tfl.gov.uk/2015/10/01/tfl-unified-api-part-1-introduction/ and plot it on a real map…

84. If we want to actually see CR2 (CR3, CR4, TL2) built then reducing the number of zones to be crossed for any journey is a very bad thing. Zones effectively create a fixed / maximum income for the system for a given start point.

85. There is no logic that states that zones should reflect geography alone.
    There are the matters, well discussed on other threads, of demand management / costs / investment etc.

    Just because it may be awkward to represent “anomalies” on a map does not mean that zones are currently “wrong”.

86. @briantist
    Been done
    http://londonist.com/2014/01/mapped-londons-oyster-zone-boundaries

    Zones don’t just represent geography, but can be used to influence travel patterns – as evidenced for example by the two Bromley stations being in different zones, the higher fares from South reflecting the much superior service than that available from North.

    But I cannot find a similar explanation why the outer zones bulge inwards in the SW corner. Look how narrow Zone 6 is in the north – one station at most. Most Tube lines don’t even get beyond Zone 5. You even have the strange situation that services from Waterloo (Zone 1) to Strawberry Hill (Zone 5) pass through Zone 6 – and officially you have to pay for all six zones!

87. I’ve just been looking at distances from London terminals on NR lines. Kingston is 12 miles from Waterloo as is Surbiton. Purley Oaks is the same as is roughly Elstree and Borehamwood. Potters bar is 12.5 and not even in the London zones. Hadley Wood is 10.5 and also in Zone 6. I don’t see the need for re-zoning of Kingston (or East Croydon which is another political pet campaign.

88. @timbeau

    OK, thanks for that… I was rather looking forward to using the new APIs. Have to think of something better to do.

89. @purleydweller
    “I’ve just been looking at distances from London terminals on NR lines”
    It does depend on which terminal, if any, is the appropriate point to measure from.

    Victoria is more than a mile closer to Clapham Junction (and therefore anywhere further out) than Waterloo is. Most trains from Hadley Wood go to Moorgate, which is 11.5 miles (not 10.5).
    Which terminal do you measure Purley Oaks from? Victoria, London Bridge – or Charing Cross?
    As for Elstree, trains from there call at five stations in Zone 1, none of them termini.

    A better criterion would be distance from the closest station in Zone 1, (e.g Vauxhall, St Pancras, Elephant) or, to avoid people being penalised for a circuitous route, a “crows flight” distance from some recognised centroid. IanVisits recently identified the centroid of Greater London as being near Lambeth North station, whilst Diamond Geezer identified the most central bus stop as being outside County Hall. However, both of these are towards the southern edge of Zone 1, so I would suggest the Charles I statue in Trafalgar Square, from where road distances are measured.

    using
    http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm
    we find the closest Zone 6 station to the King Charles statue is indeed Kingston – the country end of its platforms are exactly 10 miles from the statue.
    This is closer than 54 Zone 5 stations:
    Belvedere, Bexleyheath, Sidcup, Albany Park, Chislehurst, Bickley, Petts Wood, Hayes, South Croydon, Wallington, Carshalton Beeches, Sutton, West Sutton, Belmont, Cheam, Stoneleigh, Tolworth, Strawberry Hill, Whitton, Hounslow, Hounslow West, Hatton Cross, Hayes & Harlington, Northolt, South Ruislip, Ruislip Gardens, Northolt Park, South Harrow, Harrow on the Hill, West Harrow, Rayners Lane, Eastcote, North Harrow, Pinner, Harrow & Wealdstone, Headstone Lane, canons Park, Stanmore, High Barnet, New Barnet, Cockfosters, Enfield Chase, Gordon Hill, Enfield town, Southbury, Ponders end, Brimsdown, Chingford, Buckhurst Hill, Chadwell Heath, Becontree, Dagenham Heathway, Dagenham East and Dagenham Dock

    and eighteen Zone 4 stations:
    Abbey Wood, Welling, Worcester Park, Malden Manor, Hounslow East and Central, Southall, Seven kings, Goodmayes, Upney, and the entire Hainault Loop – seven stations – from Newbury Park to Roding Valley.

    Surbiton is 11 miles from Charing Cross as the crow flies. This is still closer than 31 stations in Zone 5 and eight in Zone 4.

90. I used Kings Cross St Pancras and London Bridge. I personally would use Tottenham Court Road as the centre as it sits about halfway through the centre and between the city and west end. Vauxhall may be zone 1 but I wouldn’t call it central London. Notting Hill Gate is too and that is definitely West London to my mind.

91. While drawing various kind of circle-like shapes round some central point is both fascinating in itself, and also useful for pointing out ‘anomalies’ in the zone system, we must remember that it is convincingly argued above (and elsewhere) that the London fare zones are not based solely on geography, but other political and economic factors weighed quite heavily in the initial design.

    More recently, of course, history is also a concern – whatever the initial reason for any particular ‘anomaly’ (even if it has gone away), there is now the drag of an established system. And the usual business that the lamentations of ‘losers’ from any rezoning will rarely be outweighed by the jubilation of any ‘winners’. In this matter, of course, the categories of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ include not just individual farepayers, but also corporate entities like train operating companies, TfL, and last-but-not-least, taxpayers and the National Debt.

92. @Malcolm
    “political and economic factors weighed quite heavily in the initial design. ”
    Indeed: for example it is noticeable that when the (originally five) zones were created, the last Tube station on each line was usually the only one in Zone 5 (e.g Harrow & Wealsdtone, Stanmore, Edgware, High Barnet, Cockfosters) – thus putting a premium on the almost certainty of getting a seat at such stations, and on the out-of-towners who would railhead there.
    When Capitalcard was invented, one way BR (as then was) avoided losing revenue without fares having to increase on LT was by splitting Zone 5 into two. hey presto -there are very few Underground stations in Zone 6 – only twenty, including the three Heathrow stations (originally two), four in Essex and two (Upminster and West Ruislip) with a large BR ridership. Thus fares in Zone 6 are of relatively little concern to TfL – nearly everyone who pays them is either a TOC client (and therefore not TfL’s problem) or doesn’t have a vote in the body that controls TfL.

    I would nevertheless be very interested to know what “political and economic factors” were used back in the 1980s to determine that Kingstonians should pay higher fares per mile than the Harrovians, Chingforders, Chigwellites, or Chislehurstish.

93. Er, didn’t the arrival of the Capitalcard predate the creation of Zone 6 by several years? I seem to remember as a child travelling on a Capitalcard (which eventually became the Travelcard) some time before my local station (Orpington) was moved to Zone 6.

94. Various people seem to be under the misapprehension that Vauxhall is entirely in zone 1.
    It isn’t, it’s an “overlap” Z1/2 station – hence all the fuss elsewhere about the new Battersea terminus on the Northern line being in Z1 ….

95. @Greg
    Not me – I am well aware that Vauxhall (and Elephant) are “boundary” stations. In my analysis above I chose “first in Zone 1” rather than “last in Zone 2” because the latter would lead to a less clear-cut definition where the boundary is between stations: e.g coming in from Hadley Wood, whether to use Finsbury Park or Caledonian Road.

    @Anonymously
    You’re right – I misremembered – (I only moved from Zone 4 to Zone 6 in 1991)

    The travelcard was introduced in 1983. the higher-priced capitalcard in 1985. The two were combined in 1989 (basically with the validity of the latter but the name of the former). Zone 5 was split in 1991. Whether this was to avoid a loss of revenue to BR (as I implied) or to stem a loss in revenue that had happened over the preceding six years, it is certainly true that the majority of stations affected by the split (45 of 59) were BR ones.

    (It may or may not be significant that Z6 was created only a month after the beginning of the premiership under which British Railways would be privatised) .

96. @Mark: Have to agree. Recently enjoyed a ‘Gatwick Express’ formed of four Southern coaches. When they arrived at Victoria, at a platform usually used by the Express, they then formed a non-express service outbound.

    Hoping when they do it it’ll respect discounts applied to Oyster Cards, eg. Annual Gold Card.

97. TfL have now added a page about 2016 fares that confirms the rezoning proposals in and around Stratford. More detail on the actual fares will appear from 2 Dec 2015.

    https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/new-fares

98. WW: but no mention there of any rezoning Pudding Mill Lane, East India and Bromley by Bow from z2/3 to z2, said in the original piece to be required for completeness.

99. @ Mike – just to repeat what I posted much earlier on in the comments. I made an assumption those stns would move to Z2 when I wrote the article. The problem with having a tidy mind! I did apologise and I thought PoP had tweaked the article. They are NOT moving which means you will have a fairly wide Z23 boundary area in East London with sequential stations on the boundary line. Certain journeys could be entirely on the boundary line – e.g Pudding Mill Lane to Canning Town. This isn’t a new concept – several sequential DLR stations are in both zones.

    http://content.tfl.gov.uk/dlr-route-map.pdf

    I only realised my error based on comments elsewhere from people who are closer to the internal workings of the fares revision and who have seen updated draft zone maps. Hopefully that’s clear!

100. During my time (until 2013) travelcard revenue was apportioned by survey. Data was collected for the journeys done according to the point of purchase. The arrival of oyster lead to a huge migration of passengers who previously purchased their tickets at toc stations to tfl stations in order to get oyster cards which only tfl could retail. This meant that tfl would have got a revenue windfall as the survey data lagged behind the rapidly changing behaviour. This was retrospectively corrected using later survey data and mitigation payments were made.

101. The recent budget though presented Londoners with a bleak future via fares – TfL’s grant of £700 million is being completetly withdrawn. So no matter how many people use the buses, trams, underground or rail services that TfL manage – it looks highly likely that we face massive fare increases within five years or so.

     “Most of the savings will come from London. Transport for London’s operational budget of almost £700m a year will be entirely wiped out by the end of the decade, leaving TfL to fund its services through commercial investment, cuts or potentially higher fares.”
     http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/25/spending-review-2015-small-print-tax-credit-cuts-student-loans

     and
     TfL faces £700m a year cut in state subsidy by turn of the decade
     http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b7392524-8923-11e5-90de-f44762bf9896.html#axzz3tg0bijGG

102. @ Anonymous at 22:28. I agree the entire subsidy will be lost but if things go as assumed London Underground will have moved into growing profit as regards operational costs which is what the subsidy is addressed at. London Overground should be approaching a break even point which leaves buses as the major issue where I think only 70% of the operational costs are recovered via the fare box. Capital spending urge would appear to be protected.

     I agree the loss of the subsidy is a matter of concern but if the combined fare box revenue increases due to a growth in patronage the hole which will need to be filled by other sources of revenue should be considerably less than £700 million which is not to say it won’t be painful.

     Having said that if other sources of TfL revenue such as the property portfolio are not sufficient to fill the gap that leaves us the option of a either dramatic cut in service and or maintenance or increases in fares above inflation or a permutation of the above. I wonder what the mayoral candidates have to say about this. At present they do not seem overly concerned. If the annual rise in ticket prices were to exceed RPI as used to be the case until very recently I am sure there will be a lot of discontent if is a substantial percentage increase above the annual inflation rise. After all Treasury originally wanted the annual rise to be RPI plus 3% but this proved impossible politically especially with a flat line of pay increases

     Can anyone cast a light on the likely outcomes?

103. Richard B
     I wonder what the mayoral candidates have to say about this. Well, one candidate ( Khan ) is trying to promise a completely-impossible fares freeze & not just for one year, either.
     Has anyone yet had the nerve to tell him it can’t be done?

104. Well, of course it can be done. It just has consequences.

     I think I read somewhere that the commissioner (can’t remember whether past or present) goes to some trouble to inform mayoral candidates of the probable consequences of their plans. Whether they chose to listen is another matter.

105. I wonder if TfL will be putting forward ideas for more extensive road pricing to increase their revenue from that particular source. Isabel Dedring has been flying a road pricing kite in some recent speeches. It may be too early for the next mayoralty but I’m sure they are playing the long game.

106. @Richard B – at this stage we simply don’t know what will happen. We need the new business plan due in 2016 (probably at Feb Board meeting). Only when the numbers are revealed can you do a comparison with the current numbers. I have been tracking the various plans so can see what’s gone up and what goes down / is shuffled about. TfL have been adept at juggling their investment portfolio to cater for annual variations.

     There are also assumptions about increasing volumes of third party revenues but I’m deeply sceptical they can be delivered. There is only so much you can screw out of advertising and retail space. There are only so many “fancy” shops charging stupid prices for “rubbish” that any market place can accommodate. I don’t see the value in turning the tube into a place dominated by niche retailers with likely short lives but that’s just me. Tube stations don’t have enough spare space to interest the supermarkets or big retailers so where’s the money going to come from? You can’t jack up the rents too far for the small shops already on the tube – they’ll simply close down and not be replaced and then you upset passengers who use those shops and you’re closing down small businesses which is contrary to Mayoral policy. It’s not easy and none of the numbers come close to filling a £700m gap.

     If you say “flog off the land” then fine but you can only do it once. If developers know you’re desparate to sell the land to keep the buses and tubes running then they’re going to drive a very hard bargain. They don’t have to build over tube tracks or on disused sidings or wherever. There are probably cheaper, more attractive sites that they can land bank until whenever. Working near the Tube is also more complex and involved and more costly. I also can’t see TfL becoming a commercial landlord in terms of housing either. That’s a non core distraction that it doesn’t need. The push to have “collect on the way home” facilities doesn’t seem to be working either – does anyone use these? The ASDA facility at Blackhorse Road car park seems deserted and taped off. Anyone seen the lockers in stations being used on a regular basis?

     My reading of the situation is that some activities, possibly ones not well understood by the general public, will simply stop. TfL will just not do them any more and hope no one notices. I suspect that funding for Borough schemes will have to be looked at again which will cause anguish and screams from local politicians but if there’s no money then tough. In any right thinking world we would be getting out of Cycle Hire (ludicrous subsidy levels) and the Cable Car but TfL are locked into sponsorship deals which means that won’t happen. The one mode that is never mentioned in TfL’s “puff” publicity is buses and that’s where the axe is going to fall if you ask me. Bus fares will keep rising, pressure to cut contract costs (and thus drivers’ wages) will continue and whatever TfL have budgeted for improvements will be whipped out of the budget. Therefore it’s congratulations to the few areas of East and West London that are currently targetted to see some new routes, double decking and frequency improvements and yah boo sucks to everyone else who will be deprived of improvements. That’s my guess – we’ll see what the numbers say.

     Politically no one bidding for the Mayoralty with a chance of winning cares about buses. One candidate never talks about them and the other yatters on about fare cuts and 1 hour bus tickets. There is no point in trying to reduce travel costs if, at the same time, you are forcing cuts on the network or are unable to cater for current demand never mind any generated demand. That is illiterate politics that should never see the light of day.

     All the emphasis is on “investment, investment, projects, investment, did I say projects” because politicians get hot and bothered about them and not about ensuring there is money to ensure the service runs at an adequate level for those wanting to use it – including early mornings, night times and Sundays. There is no point splashing billions on projects if you can’t afford enough staff to make stations feel safe, welcoming and to provide decent customer service. How long before TfL have to remove staffing from Overground and Crossrail stations? How long before all their ticket offices are closed? How long before we have completely unstaffed tube stations for many hours of the day (surface sections obviously)? This is all like the worst of the 1980s and we know what the tube was like back then.

     The Chancellor’s cuts are really designed to stop opposition politicians implemented fare freezes, cuts or different ticket products. You will note that Mr Goldsmith has no aspirations in these areas. Mr Khan has already fallen into the Chancellor’s trap by refusing to change his policies (I understand why he’s done that) but he will find it impossible to explain how he can implement a 4 year freeze, maintain services and keep investing. He says “make TfL more efficient” – sorry chap but that won’t work. Billions have already been squeezed out and we can see on the buses what happens when you do nothing for 8 years. You get falling patronage, falling revenue, hacked off passengers, journey times going backwards. That’s where we are today. Imagine another 4 years of that policy coupled with having to reduce evening, Sunday and low use but socially necessary services? What politician wants to be in charge when depriving pensioners of their bus to the shops or the doctors? A disaster in the making. And if you start damaging the buses then you encourage some people to drive which makes things worse (more congestion, slower bus journeys, less demand) and then people stop using the tube and trains because the connections aren’t there to get them home.

     And to answer Greg’s question about “has anyone told Mr Khan?” then I’ve tweeted him several times asking for an explanation of how his policies are affordable / sustainable. Not a response. With due credit to the Greens and Lib Dem candidates they have replied on questions about buses even if the answers were not thrilling.

     I am deeply annoyed about the Chancellor’s cuts. They are partisan, short sighted and completely mad. No capital city works on the basis of its public transport making a profit. There is world wide recognition that subsidised efficient public transport makes cities work better, sustains business activity and reduces the worst environmental impacts. Only in this country could we have politicians that don’t understand that. There will come a point where something “breaks” and the edifice, despite the best efforts of those running the system, will come tumbling down.

107. Re WW,

     ” There are only so many “fancy” shops charging stupid prices for “rubbish” that any market place can accommodate. I don’t see the value in turning the tube into a place dominated by niche retailers with likely short lives but that’s just me. Tube stations don’t have enough spare space to interest the supermarkets or big retailers so where’s the money going to come from? You can’t jack up the rents too far for the small shops already on the tube – they’ll simply close down and not be replaced and then you upset passengers who use those shops and you’re closing down small businesses which is contrary to Mayoral policy. It’s not easy and none of the numbers come close to filling a £700m gap.

     Agreed – there is a big threat to retail in London and the Southeast, it comes from the 2017 business rates review (delayed from 2015 as they didn’t want load of businesses and job going before an electron?) where there are expected to be big rises for circa 3/4 of premises in L&SE. The British Retail Consortium estimates there could be 80,000 shop closures as a result.

     Not a good time to try to open more shops?

     I suspect the net effect will be the accelerate the conversion of premises from retail to domestic in C/D/E list shopping locations.

108. @Walthamstow Writer – from the points in your post and purely from my layman’s perspective, that is why I think there is merit in TfL advancing the agenda for road pricing.

     The politicians will probably hate it because they think their voters will hate it (particularly the places with higher car ownership that tend to be bluer-tinged…) so it could be used as leverage for concessions in other areas of the budget.

     Personally, I think more road pricing in London is inevitable, the question is really when and how.

109. Walthamstow Writer 8 December 2015 at 14:01

     “1 hour bus tickets.”

     At “a recent meeting” I said I thought this was a good policy, which would save people who need to change buses significant money, without costing all that much on the TfL budget. Could the mayoral candidate confirm that?
     Sadiq Khan said he’d discussed the finances of his proposals with TfL, but was reluctant to reveal details.

110. Alan Griffiths: The amount it will cost on the TfL budget is precisely the total of the savings made by the passengers able to benefit from it. Even if that is “not all that much”, it is not clear to me why that sum of money, if available, should be given to those particular passengers, rather than any others in the form of price cuts (or more probably, smaller price rises).

111. @ Reynolds 953 – I suspect Ms Dedring’s “kite flying” is more to do with softening opinion about the need to toll river crossings and possibly nearby areas in order to raise funding streams and control, to some extent, traffic levels. In pure economic terms then yes there is possibly some merit to pricing road use and, of course, TfL would love to have a larger revenue base. However politically it will never fly because voters won’t swallow it. We keep being told that running Government and the national economy is like running a household which is utter, utter nonsense. The two are so far apart it’s laughable but it’s a clever old con trick that is played on the voters with great regularity. I happened to watch the programmes on BBC Parliament about Mrs Thatcher – news clips, interviews etc. Good old Norman “Chingford Strangler” Tebbitt introduced the evening’s shows. Maggie did the old “run the economy like a household” routine and the Tory faithful lapped it up. There were various clips of interviews with Ministers and I kept thinking of Mr Hewitt’s insights as people like Nick Ridley, Cecil Parkinson et al popped up on the screen. 🙂 🙂

     @ Alan Griffiths – we don’t need to play games about how much a One Hour Bus ticket will impact the TfL budget. This question is regularly asked by opposition Assembly Members at Mayor’s Questions. It has also been discussed in a TfL Fares Briefing Paper that was published a while back. Depending on the level of discount offered for the second or third journeys then the annual cost ranges from £50m-£70m. Now I am sure people would love, love, love to have free interchange for an hour but what is the point in deliberately depressing the revenue base of an operation that relies on subsidy that is going to be taken away? If TfL was awash with money and more generously and deliberately funded for these sorts of schems then fine but it isn’t and it won’t be. The simple fact is that for any bus journey in London of over 5 stops then people are getting an absolute bargain compared to commercial fares anywhere else in the country. Some short hop journeys outside London are a bit cheaper than £1.50 but many start at that level and then rise to prices like £4, £5 or higher depending on distance. Day tickets costing up to £10 for service levels way lower than London. If we were having a rational discussion with knowledgeable industry people I am pretty confident that they’d say that London bus passengers are spoilt rotten. They just don’t realise it.

     Returning to the policy question the next concern I have is that even if there was some element of trip generation from having a 1 hour bus ticket it is unlikely to be self financing. Worse it may exacerbate overcrowding on routes that are already oversubscribed. TfL has been carefully stripping out peak capacity in Zone 1 for the last 5 years. Some areas like Paddington have lost a lot of capacity and are due to lose more. Finchley Road is in TfL’s sights as having “excess capacity” even though I saw full bus after full bus along it when I was there last Sunday. Now what is the point of a cheaper fares policy if people cannot get on a bus? Also what is the point of that policy if you finance it by reducing the budget to run bus services or to improve them? We are back to the policies of the lunatic asylum (IMO, of course).

     Despite what people think and despite fares rising 66% under Mayor Johnson London’s bus fares are cheap, they are currently subsidised and we have one of the most comprehensive networks in the world. In the face of rising population and therefore rising demand to travel but zero subsidy you don’t need a cheaper fares policy or a deflated revenue base. You need a strong sustainable revenue base and spending to improve services. The problem for buses is that the contract costs, which actually fund new buses and new services, are deemed as revenue spending and not “investment”. This is despite the fact that buying more capital assets (vehicles) and adding capacity and routes would be called “investment” if you were talking about choo choos or ding a lings (trams). We are back to the lunacy that bus services are viewed as public services to be trashed and not valuable / essential infrastructure to support people’s mobility / access to jobs / access to education / shops / leisure / medical facilities. The country’s bus services are being subjected to their own version of the Beeching cuts. Once they’ve gone they are not coming back and nearly all politicians of whatever hue don’t give a damn about it (unfortunately). When they have to deal with all the costs of social isolation, excessive car travel, communities and businesses in collapse and untrained, unskilled workers (who have no means to access education or work) then perhaps they might realise what idiots they have been.

     When I hear a politician talking about bus services sensibly then I might be prepared to listen to calls for cheaper fares. It’s over to them. Can you tell I feel a bit passionate about this and how it all might be inflicted on London if we aren’t careful?

112. @ WW I absolutely agree. You put it better than I could. Frankly if the subsidy is to go I would prefer we increase bus fares to the point they cover all the operational costs rather than salami slice the service. It would still be cheaper compared to the public transport deserts beyond London. The Oyster fare is actually too low although most would deny this. We either have to agree to subsidise via national or local taxation or if that is unacceptable we should charge a realistic fare. Before we abandoned cash fares the single bus ticket cost £2.40p which is still cheap for a flat rate fare and in the absence of subsidy perhaps that should be the benchmark fare.

     It’s not as if we don’t have provision for the aged, the disabled, members of the armed forces not to mention children. I seem to recall there also used to support for the unemployed but that may no longer apply. I have no problem with subsidy and new bus fleets should in any case be considered capital expenditure anyway. I fear too many politicians and opinion formers look down on those who depend on bus travel as opposed to those who rely on Tube or rail. It’s absurd given the numbers who travel by bus within London dwarf the numbers using the other modes.

     I am someone who prefers rail based travel but realistically bus travel is essential to make London work and should be more highly regarded.

113. WW So if Tfl bought the buses and then lent them to the operators to run then the purchase would be capital and the contracts would cost less as you are then only paying fuel and drivers at which point you can reduce the 700 million revenue support which seems to go mostly on buses. Or am I missing something big.

     I agree completely on the importance of buses socially and on the general ignorance of londoners of bus prices elsewhere I hear things like London has the most expensive buses in Europe when they aren’t even the most expensive in the South East! I can’t believe the costs in the Lakes or Birmingham. Blackpool is reasonable but the buses are still owned by the council and run at quite good frequencies too.

114. @ Richard B – when the Assembly Transport Cttee did their bus report a couple of years ago they got TfL to present the bus network costs in a different fashion. If you strip out the cost of concessions, the Freedom Pass and carve out fleet renewal then the bus network actually washes its face financially on current fares. The problem is that concession costs fall disproportionately on the bus network and what is to all intents capital investment (renewal or extra vehicles) is disguised in the “running cost” numbers. TfL agreed to publish the numbers in this revised structure so people can better understand what’s going on.

     See table 9 (Bus Subsidy) in the Business Plan – http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-business-plan-2014.pdf

     @ Purley Dweller – your proposal simply shifts the money into different columns. You don’t end up millions of pounds better off. TfL are buying the NB4Ls and then leasing them to the operators at a nominal charge. However the ownership risk and book value sits with TfL as does the near £300m investment cost. TfL were forced to do this because the operators and bus leasing companies could see no onward use for such a unique vehicle design. It doesn’t fit with how any commercial bus company does business so can’t be cascaded out of London and it’s highly doubtful it could be modified extensively for onward lease to anyone else. Let’s be clear no other operator anywhere in the world is interested in buying them despite the ridiculous hype about UK industry, export sales and royalties.

     Even if TfL bought all normal buses directly there are plenty of issues about who carries what risks around their repair, their insurance cover, reliability, fuel efficiency and residual value. All this stuff can be sorted but it comes with a price tag and you can guarantee it’d be a tough battle. Passing nearly all the risk to the operators in terms of operation, safety and performance makes sense. TfL take the revenue risk which is also sensible. You really only have two other options – TfL takes it all back in house but why would the operators sell their garages to TfL? They’d flog them to the highest bidder. Alternatively you plunge London into deregulated chaos with unstable services and rocketing fares. Neither option looks like a political winner to me.

     There is nothing to suggest that TfL could simply say “we’ll buy all the buses” and a magic investment pot opens that allows them to spend between £300m and £400m every year on new buses (as shown in the business plan). Just because Chancellor Osborne gets excited when he says “infrastructure” does not mean the Treasury would allow TfL to suddenly switch buses into a capital purchase and top the budget up by £400m a year. It would be nice if it could work but it won’t. We’re therefore stuck with the prospect of massive cuts or fare rises. No politician will cut the concessions this side of an election. Worse one of them is creating false scare stories about the Freedom Pass which is a matter for the Boroughs not the Mayor in the first instance. If you really must save up to £700m a year then I’m afraid bus fares must go up and some concessions, not the Freedom Pass, will have to go / be scaled back. I’d do that rather than go about dismantling services themselves.

     This is what happens when people don’t define the bus network and bus services as essential infrastructure. Perhaps we need to stop running all of London’s buses for, oh I don’t know, a month and then see what happens to London’s economy, health service, congestion, tourism, environment? I could rant on for hours but will spare you that agony! 😉

115. @WW “The country’s bus services are being subjected to their own version of the Beeching cuts. Once they’ve gone they are not coming back and nearly all politicians of whatever hue don’t give a damn about it (unfortunately). ”

     You paint a frightening picture, and I’m sure it’s an accurate description of how the network could deteriorate, with all the knock-on effects. However, although national politicians and Mayoral candidates may not be that interested, the blowback on the ground for local councillors and perhaps GLA candidates would be immense. I would not expect them to let this happen quietly, whatever party they are from, and therefore, on the margins at least, some pressure can be exerted on the centre.

116. @Toby Chopra/WW – you can see the way it’s going. A casual perusal of this month’s TLB shows increased headways on at least 7 routes – 4 17 23 46 91 134 176, with about as many again with increased headways to reflect specifically the need to increase journey times (and the 69 and 230 reduced to reflect the “MiniHolland scheme in Walthamstow). This has been a long term secular trend now for several years. So, the hit will be taken on frequency presumably… (amongst other things)

117. Anyone who thinks £2.40 for a single is cheap, or even £1.50 clearly isn’t that har dup. For many people that is a lot. And it’s a lot more than just about any comparable major world city. Well, in most developed major cities in the EU, USA and Asia that would pay for a metro/train/tram ticket and not a hopelessly slow bus.

     I’d rather we stopped hounding the poor of working age with ever increasing costs and stopped giving wealthy pensioners free travel, as well as children of wealthy parents.

118. @SE London -what proportion of pensioners would you class as “wealthy”? The fact is that the great majority of pensioners have much less than the average wage by way of income,something less than 10% have incomes above the average wage. And in the same vein, what proportion of the total traffic in children comes from wealthy families? We won’t be saving much money there,then.

     The conundrum you imply can be set very simply: either the bus service is reduced to meet a lower fares income, or subsidy rises to reduce fares, or fares rise to keep service levels high. There isn’t a fourth way. None of these options is trouble-free;the snag with reducing fares through higher subsidy is that it encourages even more travel on a system that is already overloaded, so ramping up costs even further; it also does nothing for the poorer people who do not have access to bus services.

119. What proportion of the total traffic in children comes from wealthy families?
     Child trafficking is deprecated.

     TfL’s take on demographics and travel in London is here. Broadly it says what you would expect: pensioners and the poor use buses more and rail less*, and pensioners are vastly more likely to be disabled or poor. Household income bands that cover the top 44% of all Londoners include only 17% of pensioners.

     *pace some contrary opinions.

120. @ Toby / Graham H – While I understand your point about possible local discontent about bus cuts we need a bit of context. That context is the last 7 years where TfL have stripped out about £300m from the bus budget compared to the end state of Ken’s tenure. This has been achieved off the back of annual fare increases, continued rising demand which bucked the economy, cuts to service levels in Central London, long term service withdrawals off the back of road works / Crossrail, downward pressure on contract costs and ratcheting up of performance levels, very limited service expansion despite rising demand. I can’t recall any politician in London expressing much concern about the peak frequency cuts to many Central London routes nor about long term withdrawal of links.

     The Assembly Transport Committee revisited the general issue of buses and put some pressure on TfL on some issues but not much of substance has happened. Where the politicians have succeeded is unrelenting pressure on one or two areas where crowding and reliability were at appalling levels. These centred on the C10 route around Rotherhithe and Bermondsey and the 343 through North Peckham. The former has just had a substantial frequency increase after about 2-3 years of pressure. The 343 was relieved when the 136 was extended on from Peckham to Elephant. I suspect that only happened because the issue was covered in the “Route Masters – Running London’s Roads” TV series. Prior to this TfL had tried to ameliorate the issue by timetable tweaks and the odd extra peak bus. The programme, even allowing for inevitable bias, showed how ridiculous the situation was. The other major issue which hasn’t really been resolved is the effect on journey patterns from education and health service provision changes. TfL has had to respond at short notice to cater for excessive school flows as new schools open or existing ones expand – double decking the 66 plus several schools only routes are examples here. Better links to hospitals as specialist services / A&Es move haven’t really materialised but a first sign of a change is an upcoming change to the 83 which will be restructured to create a new 483 bus from Ealing Hospital to Harrow which will stop near Northwick Park Hospital. I am sure that constant pressure for more buses to Northwick Park from Sudbury and south has been a factor in this change.

     The only real rows about buses that are “live” are the reaction to the New Addington network changes (or cuts) and a proposal about the 424 in Fulham. Despite a long consultation period there was no effective political opposition to the New Addington changes which went ahead without a single tweak. The 424 is more interesting because Greg Hands MP (Chief Sec to the Treasury) and H&F Council are both up in arms about the proposal to hack the 424 to bits and remove it from roads with sheltered housing and to break a link to Putney. There are petitions and lobbying of the Mayor going on about that one – presumably because older people vote (he says cynically). The 424 is hardly the busiest bus in London but clearly has a high social value for its regular clientel who like having a convenient service. Having looked at the 424/485 proposal I cannot for the life of me work out what TfL are doing. The whole thing is pretty pointless and the stated objectives could be achieved in a far simpler manner without all the political “hoo haa” going on.

     So there we are – next to no resistance to major cutbacks over years and years. The only issues that generate interest are very local ones and it takes a great deal of time and pressure to effect positive change. Set alongside this is all the complaints and demands from councillors, London Travelwatch and passengers that have been ignored for years and years because there’s no money. It is only because the last change to the Business Plan put some money in for expansion that we are seeing a number of improvements now coming forth. My worry is that budget will go. And to be right “up to the minute” I see Mike Brown is in front of the Transport Committee tomorrow discussing the impact of the funding cut.

121. @wax Lyrical – and if you define wealthy as 44% of all households, that doesn’t leave much room in the middle for people who are neither wealthy nor poor! I suspect that the implied dualism of “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” is a mere hymnographer’s catch phrase that scans nicely.

122. Don’t forget that if you take away the free bus travel for the children of “rich” people be it 44% or 1%, you ignore the reason it was brought in and suddenly the roads will be even more full of Chelsea tractors doing the school run. On my way to the station I pass 20 kids waiting for a low frequency bus to school. The school is walkable but hilly so those 20 kids could be in 20 cars instead because fuel wise it would certainly be cheaper than 1.50 return a day assuming half fares.

     I’m quite surprised the under 11 fare exemption has been added to National Rail, welcome though it is to me. It seems to be an expensive perk that will be politically difficult to remove later.

123. Graham H: ‘All things bright and beautiful’ is one of my unfavourite hymns. I struggle with the notion that “God … ordered their estate” in the two lines following your excerpt.

     The incomes of Londoners are moderately unequal though:

     “The lowest mean income at ward level was in Stonebridge, Brent (£32,250), while the lowest median income was in Northumberland Park, Haringey (£25,090). Comfortably the highest mean and median was Knightsbridge and Belgravia, Westminster (mean was £176,950, and median was £88,330).”

     Source: http://data.london.gov.uk/apps/gla-household-income-estimates/
     Figures for 2013/14; lots more where that came from.

124. @Old Buccaneer -ATBAB is one of my least favourite hymns,not just for its entrenched view of a feudal society but also because at school it evoked some of the worst possible “singing” by the staff*. On the stats themselves, I’m not sure what constitutes “wealthy” and “poor” , but the figures suggest a very wide spread of possibilities. Any plan to soak the wealthy bus pass users to pay for free travel for the poor would seem require silly definitions of both parties…

     *Not to mention “Hark the herald”, which I now realise embodies the aphthartodocete heresy condemned in the seventh century. Do not sing the words “veiled in flesh” – anathema x3.

125. And the Xmas prize for most interesting non-transport related fact goes to…..Graham H! ?

126. @Graham H: TfL’s “lower income” household has under £20,000 a year. 37% of Londoners live in these households.

     Separately, you had said that something like 10% of pensioners were above average income. The 56th percentile was the nearest proxy to average income I could pull out of the document (and above that level there are only 17% of pensioners).

     No false dichotomies here, docetic or otherwise.

127. @Graham H

     “Hark the herald”
     Not Wesley’s original words, nor did he intend it to be sung to that tune.

     Mendelssohn wrote the tune for the unveiling of a statue, and thought it only suitable for secular use.

     Bah Humbug

     Can we talk about fares again?

128. @Wax Lyrical – it’s really a question of defining “poor” and wealthy” – not quite the same thing as above and below average. I believe the standard definition of poor is (at least it used to be) the bottom 10% of incomes; not sure there is an equivalent for wealthy, but to make it symmetrical, that would be the top 10% of incomes. Off hand I don’t have figures for that (anyone?) but I would imagine that’s probably incomes over about £40k pa; if so, there will be few pensioners amongst them.That wouldn’t be surprising given the way pensions are calculated – at best about half of last employed income, and a lot less for most.

129. And how much would means testing for concessions add to the cost of administering the scheme? Probably not a dissimilar amount to that “saved” by means testing…

130. I’m now not sure what you’re getting at. My purpose was to link to a helpful TfL paper which puts numbers on the topics under discussion. TfL proffer, for their purposes, an upper bound on “low income” which seems a reasonable cutoff to adopt. They split their data further into £5k bands for grades between “lower income” and undeniable poverty.

     It was you who mentioned average income—saying that pensioners were mostly below this—so I pulled out a proxy to quantify the effect. I’ve said nothing so far about “wealthy” but according to the paper I linked to, 15% of London households have income above £75k, putting them into the top band in TfL’s analysis. The document concentrates on disadvantaged groups and does not tell us anything distinctive about the wealthy as against the non-poor, or the middle-aged as against the non-young and non-old.

     You seem to think I’m being Manichaean…

131. @Wax Lyrical 🙂 ! No, I was really addressing SELondoner’s point about the desirability of withdrawing concessions from the “wealthy” in favour of the “poor” and I was trying to get a handle on what that meant practically.

     You may be a Paulician rather than a Manichean or even a Bogomil…

132. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our principal weapons are…

133. “Our principal weapons are…”
     Well, despite the fare increases, at least we are usually spared the comfy chair these days – or indeed any seat at all.

134. @GH “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our principal weapons are…”

     … a pair of snipping shears? 😉

135. I regular ponder whether the big mistake made in pricing London’s bus fares was the removal of all the zones; there is now reduced pressure to make use of the most appropriate method of transport*. If a central zone had been retained – and priced at the same cost as a central zone tube ticket – then there would be some movement off of buses there and a further reduction in NOx emissions, etc. alongside reduced overcrowding. Make it priced as where you get on the bus, not where you get off, and you probably raise more from tourists than Londoners as journeys _into_ zone one wouldn’t increase, just those within the zone. This could also cover some of the lost £700m.

     * Yes, I too consider that giving children free rides for single-stop journeys is bad, both in dwell time and in seat availability.

136. A variant of Alison W’s suggestion to price bus fares according to boarding point is already used in Hong Kong, though based there on the remaining length of the route not a zonal system.

137. Oh dear trying again – link/post seemed to have evaporated
     “AtB&B”
     HERE:
     [SNIP Greg’s reference was to Monty Python: “All things Dull and Ugly”. Some readers will doubtless enjoy this, others could be offended. If you fall in the former category, you should be able to find it with a simple search. As a general rule for everyone, links should only be posted to transport-related information. Malcolm]
     Enjoy!

138. @Ronnie MB
     that must produce some bizarre results, or at least it would in London’s network. I live about a mile from the end of a seven mile route. So you are suggesting it would cost me seven times as much to get home as it costs to get in to town?
     On another journey, there are three buses – one goes three miles, one goes four miles, and one goes about fifteen. So are you suggesting we should pay a different fare depending on which bus comes first?Ir

139. @ Timbeau – given that each bus route in HK is individually priced and some are flat fare and others graduated and many are tapered then yes it can and does cost you different amounts to go between A and B. The long distance buses charge high fares at the start of their journeys on the assumption that people are making long journeys. As they approach the end of the route and may be serving a local estate then there are local fares but only in one direction! It all sounds a bit daft and confusing but you soon learn how things work because the route numbering structure segments the network between local, cross harbour, express services and MTR feeder routes. Where there may not be the chance to catch an express for a local trip there will be a local route alongside offering cheaper fares.

     By having the fares work in the way they do it diverts people on to the “right” service for their particular journey but also allows long distance routes to mop up some traffic if people have got off the bus (not always true in the rush hour where buses are running into HK Island on the “local” section). The other thing to bear in mind is that HK bus frequencies are typically very high and there are several routes on many network sections so letting a bus go is rarely a great hardship.

     London doesn’t really have an equivalent route structure to the one in HK because we don’t have express buses nor do we have specific tube feeder routes with little other local journey purpose. Therefore I couldn’t see HK’s pricing model work in London unless we had deregulation where there would be a fares “free for all” anyway as operators battled for market share.

140. Distance based fares in Hong Kong are tapered rather than being directly proportional to distance. However, if you get on at or near the beginning of the route, you have to pay on entry for the entire route … even if you get off two stops later. The fares for different routes might well be different and your fare could well be different in opposite directions.

     I was not suggesting the adoption of Hong Kong bus pricing in London, I was merely mentioning that the approach is used there. (As Robert Bolt didn’t quite have Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons: I do not recommend it, I merely point it out.)

141. I have a vague memory of the Green Line buses charging more for local journeys than the red ones did on the same route, to discourage their use for such. The 65/265 out of Kingston vs whatever it was that went on to Dorking (and beyond ?)

142. @AlisonW: If a central zone had been retained – and priced at the same cost as a central zone tube ticket – then there would be some movement off of buses there and a further reduction in NOx emissions, etc. alongside reduced overcrowding

     Reduced overcrowding on the buses, but increased overcrowding on the tube – the reason central London bus fares were made lower than the tube is that the buses had spare capacity and the tube didn’t. If people shifted to minicabs/taxis/Uber instead then you wouldn’t get the pollution benefit. If people shift to Cycle Hire then TfL’s costs go up as that is heavily subsidised. If people just don’t travel to central London then that’s not great for the economy.

143. “65/265 out of Kingston vs whatever it was that went on to Dorking ”

     714 Oxford Circus to Dorking. There were other routes through Kingston and to Dorking, but this was the only to serve both places. In my student days I used it once but, (back on topic) as I recall, as my Red bus pass was not valid on it I only did so because there was a Red Bus strike. This must have been during the period when it was diverted via Roehampton instead of Richmond because of the infamous Petersham Hole.

144. As we strayed into the issue of “rich”, “poor” and affordable fares then this London Travelwatch report may be of interest. It combines quantitative and qualitatitve research on the travel choices and decisions faced by low paid workers travelling in from Outer London to work. Some rather interesting things emerge and some commonly held views are challenged. There are also some interesting options for how the system might be improved – especially for job seekers.

     Noteworthy that of the outer boroughs Waltham Forest has the highest monthly travel costs with most likely to be travelling to Zone 1. Croydon borough is second and residents spend the highest proportion of income on travel costs.

145. @WW – “we don’t have express buses” – Well, at least one:
     http://www.londonbusroutes.net/times/X68.htm
     (‘express’ between West Norwood and Waterloo)

     Of course, some of this conversation almost harks back to the days of bus stages rather than zones. However, when the London trams and trolleybuses ran, they also included transfer fares for change of tram or trolleybus at multiple locations on the network onto another route. The transfer fare was a fraction of the fares should separate tickets have been paid for each leg. It’s that convenience which is missing from present bus journeys when single journeys with a change is required.

146. @ Graham Feakins – sigh! I should know by now never to be imprecise when posting on a transport blog or forum. The only TfL route that even begins to resemble HK’s express buses is actually the 607 in that it’s daily, runs frequently and runs most of the day. The X68 is closer to some of the “X” or “P” suffix routes that run in HK in one direction only and even then only a limited number of trips.

     In HK there are quite extensive transfer schemes at named locations where passengers can get a cheaper through fare by changing buses (of the same operator). This means the bus companies avoid having to create a new through service and can use those resources to strengthen the routes that provide the connection at the named interchange. Only applies to users of Octopus cards, no cash transfer tickets (no tickets at all if you pay cash as it’s a farebox system).

147. @WW
     “The only TfL route that even begins to resemble HK’s express buses is actually the 607 in that it’s daily, runs frequently and runs most of the day. ”
     http://www.londonbusroutes.net/times/X26.htm

148. @timbeau – not frequent, then?

149. We are spoiled in London. the X26 may not be as frequent as the 607, but it’s pretty good by national standards – and certainly as good as most of the old Green Line schedules.

150. @ Timbeau – double sigh. The perils of late night posting. There are not that many HK routes that run on 30 minute headways – some in the more rural areas or twisty turny routes. Anyway I give up trying to remember how many express routes London has as I’ll only get corrected again. 😉

151. @WW

     The Finchley Road corridor consultation and proposed withdrawal of route 13 did cause a political storm resulting in its abandonment or postponement.

     Withdrawal of route 436 between Vauxhall and Paddington and its diversion to Battersea Park is currently under consultation and will considerably reduce capacity on the Vauxhall – Paddington corridor in addition to the cuts to the Oxford Street – Paddington trunk routes already implemented.

152. I see that the Gatwick oyster fares are now on the single fare finder. And the capping has been set way above the paper ticket level. Single fares Purley to Redhill look ok. But better buying paper except for off peak day returns unless returning in the evening peak. Overall an overcomplicated mess that noone will understand with the convenience of not queueing for a ticket at Gatwick (which is worth something).

153. @ Purley Dweller – well spotted that the fares are in the fare finder but interesting that TfL say they are “for info only”. I can see the single journey fares but can’t see daily caps anywhere. Gatwick and the other local stations are not on the list of daily caps. I note also that TfL appear to have decided that providing a pdf of single fares for zone combinations is now too difficult. You are forced to use the Single Fare Finder which is a bit of a pain in the posterior if you know the zones you want to check.

154. @WW Yes the need to use the single fare finder is very irritating – I would much rather work with a table. The Gatwick caps are on the same document as Purfleet/Grays etc, accessed via the National Rail tab. There is only a daily cap for Zones 1-9 plus those stations (for which there is no current fare) and it is much higher than the current ODT. There are no period travelcard prices using Oyster, just the Monday to Sunday cap at over £100.

     http://content.tfl.gov.uk/national-rail-2016-adult-fares.pdf

155. I presume the “for info only” comment is alluding to the fact that although the fare quoted applies from 2 January, oyster from Gatwick wont be accepted until some later date in January. A date (so far as I can tell) that is not public yet.

156. January is the date given so presumably sometime before 31st! The oyster machines are installed and working at Redhill. In fact for a couple of days last week they seemed to be set to oyster only as Key cards were registering as unknown card. I wasn’t about to try my oyster in case I got charged a maximum fare!

157. Tfl are now saying 11th January for Oyster Merstham to Gatwick. Presumably GTR wanted to get the system back on track first if there were any overruns in the Purley work.

158. The lack of a PDF on the TfL the website with the full fares tables is irritating to us too. The “fare finder” makes the overall picture opaque, and does not allow commuter groups such as ours to maintain a historical set of fares for comparison and research purposes.

     Much of the data is in the Mayor’s decison letter, so it is not as though TfL cannot generate the necessary PDF for their own website. (Incidentally the links at the head of the LR article are now broken – the GLA have reorganised their website! The document can however be found through links at https://www.london.gov.uk/md1562-january-2016-fare-changes

159. This must be a first for this site – a post from a faceless corporate body – where will it end? A slugging match between “DfT” and “TfL”?

160. Oh my actual!

     Have you seen how they have done the Zone 2/3 crossover around Stratford/East Ham.

     http://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map.pdf – why isn’t Clapton in the dark grey Zone 2/3 area but Stratford International Is? Why is there a light grey bit of Zone 2 below North Greenwich, rather than continue with the dark grey Zone 2/3? Why not continue dark grey Zone 2/3 all the way to Lewisham?

     http://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf isn’t much better!

     IMHO of course!

161. @ Briantist – I assume the combined zone is not contined north and south to avoid creating the impression that is bigger than it actually is or that it straddles the Thames. The whole concept is not ideal and it’s not easy to present visually. At some point Lea Bridge Station has to be shown on the map and I suspect extending the zone northwards to Clapton could have created the idea that it’d be in the combined zone when logically it will be in Zone 3. You start to get into “silly land” then because the argument will be “why isn’t Tottenham Hale in Z23?” “why isn’t South Tottenham in Z23?” etc etc etc as people draw vertical lines and follow rail routes on the map and draw inferences that aren’t there.

     The Mayor has been very clear, pointed in fact, that this rezoning is a one off and creates no precedent anywhere. Of course the original idea was badly thought out when first announced because someone, somewhere had not looked at the ramifications for Jubilee Line / DLR passengers travelling south from Stratford hence the need for a combined zone rather than just rezoning three stations.

162. Diamond Geezer has really laid into it recently… It looks like a tumour to be honest…

     I was plaaning a tour of London when I heard about Oyster not working this morning, then they fixed it! Damn and blast (again)!

163. @WW – the zone 2/3 area does straddle the Thames, with North Greenwich in it.

     Of course, the sensible thing would have been to put Pudding Mill Lane, Bromley-by-Bow and East India into zone 2. Sure, the price of tickets out to zone 3 and beyond stations would cost more from those stations now, but I doubt they are common – the key reason why those stations were zone 2/3 (cheaper fares heading one stop out to the Jubilee line to go to Docklands/South Bank/West End or Stratford) is now ‘fixed’.

164. I note that there has been no comment so far about the TfL rail diagram’s expansion to include Dartford and the Hertford East branch within PAYG/contactless capabilities. I’m not sure whether adding in Shenfield is new or not. The distinctive divergence between ‘classic’ Oyster zones and PAYG/contactless boundaries starts to become interesting with this. Maybe a precedent for Crossrail 1 towards Reading? And how soon before Hertford North joins the family, etc?

165. This thread isn’t really the place for it, Dartford having been a September 2015 change, Hertford East et al being October 2015 change, and Shenfield was a January 2013 change (with Brentwood moving from ‘zone B’ to zone 9 in May 2015 when TfL Rail began).

     Wikipedia on beyond zone 6 zones

166. @Walthamstow Writer

     I’m not saying “what about putting other stations in zone 2/3”, what I’m saying is that the representation of some Zone 2/3 stations as being in the new dark-grey zone 2/3 and others right next to them being half in Zone 2 and half in Zone 3 is poorly done.

     All the stations I mentioned (such as Clapton) are all in Zone 2/3. It should be shown as one block, not having two ways of showing the same thing next to each other… surely?

     [The design of tube maps is one of those recurring subjects which often seems to crop up, and resolution is infrequent. Not a banned topic, but would all contributors please continue to tread carefully. Malcolm]

167. @WW: Regarding yor posts around 8/12….

     I quite agree, in theory we should be giving job seekers free bus/train/tube travel. This would maximise benefit to society by enabling job seekers to attend interviews and get jobs. Instead they seem to be getting their benefits cut (i.e. Food, shelter) because they failed to attend a meeting at a job centre because they were at an interview!

     This then moves the cost from one budget to another (emergency shelter, food banks)…

     It strikes me that the cuts will only come back to bite all of us (excepting newspaper proprietors and politicians born to rich parents)…

     All of which for selling this dream of “You can have everything without paying tax” that most politicians seem to peddle (quite successfully) since the Mrs. T era…

     I recently read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, it’s not pleasant, but should be read by all…

168. @ Milton C – there are several interesting changes on the rail and tube map related to fares.

     – Hertford East branch added
     – Dartford into Zone 8
     – The line to Gatwick being added from 11 Jan but shown now
     – HS1 being in scope of Oyster / contactless now between St P and Stratford International.

     I believe Shenfield was previously shown as Oyster was extended out there a long while back.

169. @WW
     Indeed.

     Ignoring some of the detail, I detect some significant changes in how the ‘Zones’ (essentially a Greater London and close-by phenomenon of great importance), are now being left behind, by the migration of PAYG/contactless into the Home Counties hinterland – and now quite overtly as well.

     How soon before Luton Airport, one might ask? – it is after all the same NR operator as Gatwick Airport.

     East-West we have Crossrail 1 emerging, with implications for electronic ticket inter-availability along the GWML. Subject to a willingness to participate by the prevailing operator (and DfT oversight with acquiescence, quite important I’m sure), it looks to me that PAYG might, in the right circumstances, become a useful currency within the near Home Counties.

170. @ Milton C – I think what we are seeing is the effect of there being no strategy for fares on the National network nor, really, for TfL. There are strategies to reduce the cost of providing a ticketing service for TfL but that’s as far as it goes. Everything else is some knee jerk reaction to “events” or political pressure or some development led wheeze. The resultant “mess” and patchwork quilt of partial provision with fares anomolies galore and long established precedent being cast aside shows that either no one cares or, more likely, people don’t know what they’re doing. It’s really very poor indeed.

     I know for a fact that Crossrail related ticketing matters (in the widest sense) have been under discussion for many years. What I don’t know is what has been decided – other than the adoption of “TfL fares” whatever that means in the light of what came forth after TfL took on West Anglia / Shenfield line plus the principle of some sort of surcharge for access to Heathrow. I see HAL are trying to get an extortionate payment for each Crossrail train going down their tunnel. It will clearly be for the next Mayor to take the final decisions about what he signs off by way of a direction to TfL to bring the Crossrail service and its fares and ticketing into service. I don’t expect any divergence away from GWR fares for stops beyond West Drayton to the west. DfT has seen to that already.

     I think we are being quietly lined up for the eventual move away from zones to a more nuanced “market based” pricing on TfL routes but that will take some time to achieve because TfL have to “educate” each Mayor about the realities it faces. I also suspect Travelcard may be on the way out too but that, I think, requires legislation.

171. The Telegraph dreamt up this story on Wednesday which provoked a very terse press release in response from the RDG the next day.
     A lovely way to rubbish a story which was total fantasy – certainly in the reported timescale.

172. @ Mike P – the Telegraph story is indeed nonsense as they’ve completely misunderstood the technology. They also don’t understand how existing ticketing works and what flexilbility exists for things like break of journey which no smart ticketing can cope with if you’re using PAYG as the underlying basis for travel. You could lash something together if people order single or return tickets and load them to a card but what’s the point of that if you’re a TOC? Passengers still have multiple transactions – one to order the product, another to collect it and then more to use it (via gates). I am sure it’s not impossible to programme the Routeing Guide permitted journey logic into a gate or a validator. However whether you can check a loaded ticket product for break of journey against those rules and process it within a few milliseconds is far more of a challenge. I doubt passengers would want to lose the flexibility around break of journey nor the ability to buy cheap tickets and link them together to get a discount compared the normal fare (split tickets).

     There are oodles of other issues which will make a move away from paper ticketing extremely difficult on the National Rail network. I think this is one of those instances where politicians have been blinded by technology and aren’t aware of the many pitfalls that lie ahead and could ensnare them in all sorts of trouble.

173. @WW I concur with the “complete nonsense” conclusion. For many reasons, some of which you have touched on. Doubtless some politicians have suffered the misunderstandings you mention, though there is no evidence of this in the telegraph story, which they seem to have invented all by themselves.

     I am not so sure that passengers in general are as keen on (or even aware of) break of journey possibilities as you suggest. Nor on split tickets. But they would definitely miss the certainty, with the present system, of knowing what your journey will cost before you need to decide to make it. Londoners seem to have tolerated losing this (with Oyster), but not being sure if your journey will end up costing £3 or £15 is a bit different from, say, London to Manchester, where you might be expecting £30 and finish up paying £150 by accidentally getting on a different train.

     Wonderful new ticketing schemes would also, of course, be far more feasible with a re-formed British Rail than they ever could be for the present bunch. But that’s a different pipe-dream!

174. @Walthamstow Writer
     2 January 2016 at 20:57
     I agree that is it a messy rather than coherently planned process, currently. The timescales aren’t helping, in the case of Heathrow which you mention. Crossrail has to negotiate initial access for May 2018 for trains and fares levels (to replace Heathrow Connect), and for a full service in December 2019. Meanwhile Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd potentially loses or has to renegotiate its GW track rights by 2023. WRAtH is another layer, including who might run it. You can see why Heathrow fares might be a bagatelle to be subject to various bargaining and commercial priorities.

175. An implication of Milton Clevedon’s : 06:19 post is that if LHR Express and Connect fail to agree terms for access to the GW tracks is that we could end up with a ‘tunnel to nowhere’. Which wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that CR1 would be able to take up the slack.

     Is this, in essence, a good reason to prevent the private ownership of rail permanent way assets?

176. @AlisonW: I’d say it’s a lesson in how you finance investment in long-life assets without fettering your flexibility in how you make use of those assets. Hospitals and telecomms infrastructure could teach similar lessons.

177. @ Milton C / Alison W – if I understand matters correctly then the final determination of track access costs rests with ORR anyway. Obviously better if the parties can agree something in terms of charges but ORR still has to maintain oversight of the costs and path allocation. This is to ensure that all parties requiring access are treated fairly. I believe there is also something in law that protects Crossrail’s access to Heathrow but doesn’t entitle it to a bargain basement track access charge. I wish I could track down the old reference to the agreement about Heathrow access and fares that someone kindly posted on this blog a few years ago. I’ve tried umpteen times to find it by trawling through past comments but have never found it again!

     Having had a quick web browse it seems that there are some wider issues here that I’d forgotten about. As previously discussed on LR Heathrow Airport successfully reduced their planned contribution to Crossrail’s funding leaving DfT with a £160m unexpected bill. It now looks like there is an attempt to generate a large revenue stream via track access charges that could “pay back” the £70m that HAL did contribute to Crossrail and possibly then make Crossrail a profitable enterprise for them! I imagine DfT is not best pleased at that prospect and we guess what TfL and City Hall think. An interesting situation when you set it in the context of pending decisions about Heathrow’s future, Mayoral Elections etc etc. Someone’s seemingly decided to play “hard ball”. One to watch I think.

178. @WW -Thank you for the interesting info about the HAL deal – I don’t recall it making the trade press (not rail business oriented) nor the national “newspapers”. HAL may have made a serious misjudgement call: if I know my former colleagues have a defining characteristic, it’s a very long collective memory and the tribal ability to carry a grudge over many decades.

     HAL’s silly games will cost it dearly with WRaTH also, as any potential “through” traffic across the airport will be priced off, which will have consequences for the WRaTH business case…

     BTW, are you sure that the regulator’s remit extends into the airport? ORR doesn’t have automatic jurisdiction over all UK railways – it was extended to HS1 by specific legislative provision, for example – perhaps the airport link legislation made it possible?

179. Graham H
     Indeed – you confirm my impression (shall we say) that HAL are wanting all the money NOW, without regard to any long-term consequences & that we might be approaching err “Pay-back” time?
     I for one, would not shed any tears for them, if that were so.

180. @ Graham H – the story made the Sunday Times and was picked up in brief by the Daily Mail. I saw it via a post on another forum. The reference to ORR is directly from the article – I’m certainly not an expert on the scope of ORR’s regulatory powers so you may well be right that it’s outwith ORR’s remit. There are various things, including secured train paths, in the Crossrail Act itself which facilitate the operation of the planned service – I’ve read a few of them but again I’m not an expert nor a lawyer. Given the service has to earn a surplus to pay back some of the funding as well as deliver wider benefits you can understand why the scheme promoters would want paths reserved for the planned service. It would be completely unacceptable for the scheme’s viability to be able to be sabotaged over something like train paths.

     I must admit I did think of your previous remarks over many different articles about spite and elephantine memories residing in Whitehall. It does seem an odd approach by HAL to be quite so “pushy” but who knows how nasty the overall politics around Heathrow already is. They may consider they have little to lose by taking a hard line over Crossrail.

181. Must admit to not reading either beyond a scan of their online headlines; wouldn’t expect the average journo to know the more abstruse dimensions of ORR activities.

     @Greg T – the cynical explanation is usually the right one, of course. [Is it HAL or Heathrow (or both) which incurs your WRaTH?]

182. As I’ve said before – There is a very large extended family of Heathrow companies whose interests aren’t always completely aligned.

     The rail assets and operations are currently the responsibility of Heathrow Finance Plc and its subsidiary HEOL (equivalent to a TOC) [and lie outside the Regulatory Asset Base for CAA purposes*] not the other 2 main entities HAL and HAHL. The annual depreciation is interestingly very similar to what they are demanding from Crossrail annually.

     The CAA were responsible for cutting Heathrow’s contribution to Crossrail which will also make things interesting within DfT. Heathrow may assume it is water under the bridge but I doubt any one else will…
     This won’t be good for TfL’s finances and TfL will rightly complain to DfT that if the operating grant was cut it was on the understanding that Crossrail would be paying access charges that that were linked to real costs.

     DfT said: “As a joint sponsor of the [Crossrail] project, we oppose increased charges to train operators to access the Heathrow spur. As supporters of the growth agenda, we recognise the important role the private sector plays in bearing its fair share of these costs, particularly where they are benefiting now and more so in the future.”

     Heathrow wants to charge a fee of £597, plus a maintenance charge of £138, to be paid by Crossrail every time one of its trains uses the line. Which depending if that is a single journey or return (which would effectively be 1 continuous use of the asset) a total of either £40m or £20m p.a.
     The maintenance charge is probably about 10 times what they would be expecting before the access fee even comes into it.
     I suspect DfT were expecting Heathrow Connect type costs.

     HEx currently pays £1.04/mile to use NR infrastructure and a small share of the £2.6m Paddington annual cost.

     Was the Heathrow crossrail contribution all cash or mix of cash and access in lieu? in the later case increasing the access costs make a lot of sense.

     * This one manoeuvre alone made it very easy to claim it was doing its job to keep cost increases down and efficiencies up in the RPI-X style of regulatory models used in utilities and airports for that five year period, it won’t be so easy to find another easy one next time.

183. There are interesting monopsonistic issues here which might end up with the Competition Commission and the NAO (and ORR where that has a role).

     Or is this a case for nationalisation for the greater good?! John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes & Harlington and including the airport, is the new Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

     Here is Harold Wilson’s March 1945 report about financing the nationalisation of the railways, which became the Labour blueprint after the 1945 election. Basically he said pay the market price – not a lot then with an over-capitalised and partly worn-out railway.http://www.jrc.org.uk/PDFs/The-Finance-of-Railway-Nationalisation-March-1945-report-by-Harold-Wilson.pdf

     The London 2050 infrastructure Transport Support Paper references a TfL desire to take over Heathrow Express, while the July 2011 LSE Route Utilisation Strategy points clearly towards HEx having to be shunted onto the relief lines, at least in peak periods, at some point in the 2020s.

     All this suggests that sequential or combined negotiations about
     (A) track access within Heathrow for Crossrail
     (B) on the GWML for HEx and WRAtH services
     (C) the business case, ownership and operations of WRAtH
     will be tough and involve a number of interested and possibly grumpy parties.

     It cannot help the Government’s position that it has delayed a decision about Heathrow runway expansion – not that that might influence Heathrow about pricing for its rail access monopoly supply of track, as an expanded airport would then rely even more on rail access.

     Clearly Heathrow is demanding several pounds of flesh in its proposed fees – not least, possibly to retrieve its potential revenue reductions from HEx operations once Crossrail opens. Some of which might transform into higher Crossrail fares – the starting point of this discussion.

184. @ngh – clearly our man in the smoke filled room! As you say, extraordinary stuff. One question and one comment: doesn’t the income from Heol* go into a Common Till (along with parking income and other similar)? And if so,isn’t that capped in some way or linked to RAB-related income? You are right – the charges are extraordinary for a short piece of line even if it is in tunnel. Compare it with the charges for, say,moving a freight up from the West Country (around £5k) or a trip up EC (about the same) – it’s about 30-50 times as high, proportionately. The balance between fixed and variable is also way out of kilter with the rest of the railway – normally,something between 3:1 and 2:1, not 4:1.

     @JR – one would be comforted if one actually believed that the DfT even conceived of the need to play this polydimensional game as a single event; not much sign of that so far.

185. The missing * note was simply to note that I’m more used to Heol being followed by a suitable Gallicism such as Newydd or Glas…

186. Graham H
     APPLAUSE for the pun!
     Err … HAL & the airport’s “management” generally.
     All the huffing, puffing, threatening & posing about “3rd runway” & a lot of this coming from their boss ( one WW – not to be associated with the home-life of our own dear WW of course! ) adding to it in public …
     Gives me a permanent impression of: “Arrogant, powerful, bully” – I could be completely wrong, of course, but my automatic reaction to that sort of thing is to walk as far away as possible if I can ….

     ngh & JR
     Thanks for that – most illuminating.

187. Could HAL already know that the government aren’t going to let them have their third runway? If they know it’s not going to happen, they’ve got nothing to lose by behaving in this way.

188. Some interesting and insightful comments above. Looks like this one could run and run and get rather “involved”.

     @ Greg – if you are referring to a certain Mr Walsh then he’s an airline boss and not an airport boss. He’s not adverse to some bolshiness but not unexpected in the airline business which seems to attract “larger than life” characters. I’m not certain quite what relevance my home life has to the debate. 😉

189. Re Greg,

     On a little further checking it is even more complicated.
     HAL gets all the HEx ticket revenue (and hence risk) and pays Heathrow Finance Plc and HEOL for running the services and infrastructure etc. HAL has 0 employees so ticket sales at the airport are handled by their subsidiary LHRL which does have employees…

     It could take quite bit of effort to work out the finances in detail.

     NR also operate the Heathrow branch signalling from Didcot.

     As what they want to charge makes SE HS1 access costs look exceptionally reasonable in comparison, DfT are unlikely to be amused.

190. So today the extremely messy Redhill to Gatwick Oyster fares started to work. Or at least the readers were switched on.

     Confusion everywhere as no-one understands the new fares. If you are making a single or return journey to Victoria or London Bridge then it’s cheaper on Oyster. Otherwise if you (like most passengers) use an additional service (say to Oxford Street and back) then the Oyster fare becomes more expensive than a Paper ticket.

     It’s not just bad enough that fares along the Redhill route are significantly ripping us off as cash cows, now the government have found a way to extract even more money from us.

191. Re T33,

     Certain oyster options may be more expensive than paper tickets but not joining the ticket machine queue at Gatwick will make the extra worth while surely???

     But as I won’t be using oyster + tube combo I’ll take discount and the benefit of not joining the ticket queue at Gatwick 🙂

192. Purley to Redhill return is cheaper off peak and more expensive peak. Also there is an afternoon peak to confuse issues even more. Like ngh I will be using it to avoid the queues at Gatwick and not a lot else.

193. Purley Dweller,

     Interesting I’ll just checked the Oyster Fare finder.

     My local station to Gatwick Oyster fares are:
     £9.20 peak
     £5.80 off peak

     National Rail Journey planner paper tickets:
     £11.20 peak
     £8.50 off peak

     So £2.00 or £2.70 discount
     I’ll take those discounts as well as the improved convenience!

194. NGH

     Whilst some fares do offer cheaper fares particularly point to point single or return fares. A lot of journeys (in fact I’d say a majority) use travelcards where Oyster fares are more expensive.

     So if I do Redhill to Victoria then tube to Westminster and back on Oyster the cost off-peak would be £16.40 but the paper travelcard is £16.00. It get worse if you use several modes of transport as the “net” cap works out at £19.00 against £16.00. (Figures from querying Southern today)

     By “net” I mean as the Redhill to Victoria fare is not included in Oyster Cap AFAIK – then its the Redhill to Victoria single fare x2, plus the standard Oyster Zone cap.

195. T33 – does it do that or does it cap at the higher Redhill to Zones 1-9 rate that was breifly on TfL but now seems to have disappeared.

     I notice that Southern are not acknowledging the ability to use Oyster on their website as it still refers to London zones. Gatwick Express and Thameslink also have nothing. The readers have had their Oyster not valid stickers taken off at Redhill and someone had an Oyster on the ticket check this morning.

196. Purley Dweller,

     http://www.southernrailway.com/tickets-and-fares/ticket-types/gatwick-payg?hootPostID=87838e5d601ed2fb1bf5e25a973aeabe

     Southern have also been tweeting about is as their good news item all day long and have created some artwork for the occasion:

     https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYcdMc9W8AA493L.jpg

197. Yes and passengers are not being warned that this “Good News” is bad news for the majority of travellers in terms of higher fares for travelcards. Most tickets bought are travelcards too.

     Yet another new form of taxation – create even higher fares and extract more money from Redhill passengers who already over pay for their fares. Really think the DfT has a fatwa against Redhill Branch passengers – they really hate us. Cut all our services and charge us over the top fares.

198. Its a complete mess – its so complicated that people are going to caught out, they’ll pay more. How many poor tourists on their way out of the country they are going to be fleeced without even knowing it? Disgraceful behaviour by TfL and the TOCs. How ludicrous is it that you need a specialist website like this one below just to do what should be a simple journey?

     “this is the most complicated extension yet, and great care will need to be taken to ensure that you aren’t overcharged . . . Astonishingly it turns out to be cheaper to split most journeys at East Croydon if travelling further north.  This involves walking up the ramp to the gateline to touch out and then touch back in again . . . If you’re travelling in the peak time then it should be cheaper to avoid zone 1 (example using New Cross Gate or Surrey Quays and New Cross).  But, travel off-peak and amazingly the fares become more expensive!  This doesn’t apply if you split the journey at East Croydon of course . . .

     And don’t use the wrong gate at Victoria

     ” . . . But if the journey is on a non-Express service between Victoria and Gatwick then using the wrong gates will result in the wrong fare being charged.  It does work both ways, so if an Express uses a platform other than 13 or 14 the lower fare will be charged.”

     Still plenty of staff I presume at Cubic in Salfords will be happy – no more nasty paper tickets for them – they’ll know the system inside out – unlike many hapless passengers who’ll be sure to lose money on this journey.

     see http://www.oyster-rail.org.uk/2016/01/oyster-at-gatwick/

199. One way of economising has been to make use of the Boundary Zone extension tickets, available to zonal season and Freedom Pass holders.

     Interesting times therefore for travelers in the GoVia/Southern area, as these tickets are not – so far – available on line and rarely from machines, and of course GoVia are consulting on closing many if not most of their ticket offices.

200. @JimS – I think the trick is that you simply type in the name of the Zone 6 boundary station as the starting station. This is how Southern describe it: “If you want to travel outside of the free travel area you can simply buy an extension ticket from the boundary of where the Freedom Pass is valid to where you would like to go.”

201. @Jim S/Graham F
     “I think the trick is that you simply type in the name of the Zone 6 boundary station as the starting station.”
     But first you have to find a ticket machine where you get a choice of starting station.

202. @timbeau – So far as I am aware, at least all Southern ticket machines provide a choice of starting station and have done so since last year.

     This link takes you to some short, exciting Southern videos of e.g. how to buy tickets starting from another station and buying a boundary extension. Note: I must correct my comment above, in that you have to type in “Boundary” and a choice of zones pops up, from which you can choose the boundary zone appropriate to your journey.

     http://www.southernrailway.com/tickets-and-fares/buying-tickets/ticket-vending-machine-videos#3

     However, when booking online, the ‘Boundary’ facility as such does not seem to be available and I suppose my original suggestion still stands in that case.

     One would hope and expect that ticket machines of other London TOCs provided the same sort of facility (or is that too much to expect?). I was in Sheffield earlier ‘today’. I should have had a play at one of the half dozen or so machines lined up there, to see if they coped with London boundary zones!

203. @Graham F
     “One would hope and expect that ticket machines of other London TOCs provided the same sort of facility (or is that too much to expect?). ”

     That was my point. Hope, yes: but I have learned not to expect anything from my local TOC. Their machines do not sell tickets from any station other than the one they are installed at, and last time I raised this with them they said their planned “upgrade” of the machines would not remedy this shortcoming.

204. Graham at 2141

     The problem is that the ‘trick’ of using a named boundary station means you may have to use a train that calls there, the distinct advantage of a proper ‘Boundary Zone’ extension fare is that in conjunction with another zonal fare such as an existing travelcard season you can pass through the ‘boundary’ on a non stop service.

205. Timbeau @ 0810

     Whilst appreciating that is not the answer to all circumstances I have taken to buying most of my tickets online. Not only do I generally just have to work with one TOC, so with stored personal details, they reward me (slightly) for doing so. If my fingers were somewhat slimmer I could probably do this on my mobile phone as I approached the actual ticket machine.

206. @JB
     “I could probably do this on my mobile phone as I approached the actual ticket machine.”
     It seems a bit cockeyed that you should need to use a smartphone to buy a ticket when you are already standing in front of a ticket machine!

     @Paul
     ” in conjunction with another zonal fare such as an existing travelcard season you can pass through the ‘boundary’ on a non stop service.”
     Not so – as long as one (or both) of the tickets is not a one-trip ticket there is no requirement for the train to stop at the boundary, even if there is a station there. A point to point season from Kings Cross to Brookmans Park (or indeed a Railrover or Freedom Pass) plus a single from BrPk to Cambridge is perfectly valid on a non-stop KX- CBG train.

     Where a “boundary Zone” ticket does score over a ticket from the last station in the zone is when that station is not an overlap station. If I have a Zone 1-4 Travelcard and want to travel to Caterham, a single ticket from the last station in Zone 4 (Norwood Junction) will be charged for three zones, but from Boundary Zone 4 only for two.

207. timbeau says “It seems a bit cockeyed that you should need to use a smartphone to buy a ticket when you are already standing in front of a ticket machine! ”

     It doesn’t seem at all cockeyed to me. My smartphone is mine, and I can stare at it and cogitate options for just as long as I fancy. A shared ticket machine puts me straight into the mindset that I must vacate it ASAP for the next user, even if there is no-one there (let alone if there is a queue).

     The same phenomenon might account for the near-extinction of hotel rooms without en-suite facilities!

208. @ Timbeau & Malcolm

     Cockeyed yes, in the sense that the machine ought to have the same functionality as my phone in the absence of a real ticket office. However, I suspect that the practicality of having such a machine to sell any type of ticket from anywhere to anywhere is not a realistic option.

     Some machines struggle with fairly simple things. Last week I was in York with my wife and we wanted to go to Harrogate. I wanted two off-peak day returns with Senior Railcard discount. Following the instructions on the screen would not give me what I wanted. After the fourth attempt I spoke to an engineer who was fixing the adjacent machine. ” Ah,” he said, “the machine won’t tell you, but it can’t sell more than one discounted ticket at a time.” However, if I had done the transaction on my phone and merely used the machine for ticket delivery it would have happily printed two sets of tickets from one booking file.

209. @Malcolm
     “My smartphone is mine, and I can stare at it and cogitate options for just as long as I fancy. A shared ticket machine puts me straight into the mindset that I must vacate it ASAP for the next user”

     But you still need to use (and queue for) the ticket machine to print the tickets.

210. The southern ticket machines are very good and can sell anywhere to anywhere unless you want to buy groupsave or plus bus. I hope they work those out before they start closing the ticket offices in busy stations like purley.

211. @Graham F
     ” I was in Sheffield earlier . I should have had a play at one of the machines, to see if they coped with London boundary zones!”

     I would be very surprised if they did, since that station’s operator’s other franchise covers a large chunk of London suburbia, and none of their ticket machines can do that.

212. timbeau says “But you still need to use (and queue for) the ticket machine to print the tickets.”

     True. But printing TOD tickets is fairly rapid, and takes a predictable amount of time, and causes me no embarrassment, even in a queue. Deciding whether I want the train at exactly my preferred time at £21, or a slightly less-preferred time at £15 (as just one example) takes as long as it takes, and under queue pressure I can be pretty sure to leap from the frying pan into the wrong fire.

213. @timbeau – I’ll try the machine at Chesterfield on Wednesday. Additional observation about very busy Sheffield this Saturday morning gone: a number of those half dozen ticket machines, all located beside the ticket office windows, were free to use and yet there was a significant queue wending its way around a corralled maze awaiting a vacant ticket office window, of which at least three were in use. Just demonstrates to me the need for human contact ‘at the window’.

214. I just want to add one (totally off-topic) comment on Hong Kong buses since they were being discussed. There was at least one bus interchange point – at the Shing Mun Tunnel – where you could simply walk from one bus to another (no need for a ticket to be checked). Not sure whether it still applies.

     And you’d only pay £1.50 here for a long distance journey, or one under the Cross-Harbour tunnel.

215. London Assembly doesn’t believe Sadiq over available monies, after fares freeze … or so it appears, anyway.

216. @ Greg – to be fair the budget setting process does not conclude until December so the Budget and Performance Cttee report (not the entire Assembly) reflects a snapshot at a point in time. I don’t think anyone doubts there is an enormous financial challenge for TfL. However it is wrong to predict a complete meltdown at this point and the Cttee is really asking for a lot of transparency and disclosure. That’s fair enough but let’s not delude ourselves that some of them want the info so they can criticise the Mayor and the Labour Party. That’s a large part of what sits behind more than half of the Mayor’s Questions that are asked.

     Ironically the Mayor was pressed on the findings of the report on BBC London. He smiled sweetly and said “The Transport Commissioner has said he can deliver my manifesto promises”. So that’s Mike Brown’s neck in a noose then! Very clever response from the Mayor and deftly puts responsibility one step away from him (for now). We also know the Autumn Statement is due late Nov and that will be important in setting “the tone” between City Hall, TfL and the Treasury over investment monies.

217. Well the new Hopper Ticket starts on Monday so I suppose all buses and trams have been equipped with atomic clocks that show the right time !

     It seems that while bus to bus or bus to tram or combination is allowed if someone say leaves a bus at Cabary Wharf pops over to North Greenwich and then boards a bus they will be charged two seperate bus fares until system is upgraded in a couple of years time .

     The Tories have complained about the cost of Hopper Tickets in lost revenue but this will be a fraction Boris has spent on his Borisbuses !

     Anyway Hopper ticket is idea Khan has adopted from Caroline Pidgeon of Green Party .

     It seems introduction of Hopper Ticket brings prospect of longest journey possible using this ticket on two buses .

218. @Melvyn – I am not sure that it is fair to say that “Hopper ticket is idea Khan has adopted from Caroline Pidgeon” because plenty before Caroline over here had the chance to adopt the identical concept from, dare I say it, Continental Europe, where such had been introduced e.g. in Germany and The Netherlands, by the late 1960’s.

     As such, there were many folk, perhaps not so well known but they produced evidence, available as published in the professional press in the UK, who had proposed such an arrangement over here long before Caroline.

     I myself still retain German tram tickets from 1969 onwards which permitted one hour’s travel with change of tram/bus/whatever within that period without additional charge. Maybe Mr. Khan meant to say that he is adopting the concept from what I and others suggested back then!

219. @ Melvyn – that would be Caroline Pidgeon of the *Liberal Democrats*.

     @ Graham F – yes lots of people have suggested we have european style ticketing. AFAIK it was never on Ken’s agenda in the late 80s nor post 2000. If anyone could have got it in quickly and with little issue it was him given what else he was doing. However those lots of people have rarely (ever?) been party political leads on the London Assembly nor Mayoral candidates with the ability to have policies and seek election. I don’t recall there being the “GF excellent transport Party” on the ballot paper every Mayoral election since 2000 but perhaps I missed it? I don’t think there is much doubt that the policy of a 1 hour bus ticket has been LD policy for well over 4 years nor that it was dismissed many times during Boris’s tenure for no good stated reason. Clearly politics and money were the reasons and that’s no shock.

220. @GF, WW: The current limited version of the Hopper is basically what the Americans would call a “free transfer”, common practice in the US and so would have been very familiar to the various Americans in senior management at TfL over the years.

221. @ Ian J – I’d sincerely hope there is enough knowledge and expertise in TfL about worldwide ticketing systems, their operation and technology to not rely on the nationality of a few senior managers. A lot of the Americans are long gone anyway – some to less than auspicious careers elsewhere.

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