Friday Reads – 15 February 2019

On By In Friday Reads, New York, Pedestrians, Trams/Streetcars/LRT

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16 comments

  1. The big difference between that Underground map and the current Travelcard Zones is that the “zones” on Phil’s map are centred on the station in question and would shift slightly for each origin. A journey from one side of London to the other would therefore cost more than one just to the centre. Interesting to note that as now you could save money by getting off at Earl’s Court and walking a very short way to West Brompton (okay, only 5p, but in context that’s a third of the fare!). I’m surprised no-one else has yet done an in-depth analysis of the various inconsistencies and loopholes.
    A map based on (say) Oxford Circus would naturally have been one of the components of devising the current Travelcard zones but there is no reason why it would have had to match exactly.

  2. Andrew S: The resemblance between Phil’s map and today’s Zone map is purely visual. Today’s London zones do indeed resemble concentric circles, but this is not generally the case for fare-zones world-wide. In a less “centre-oriented” region, they look like the cells of a honeycomb (e.g. the one you can download from https://www.l.de/verkehrsbetriebe-en). Whereas, of course, with the old system of individual fares for every station-pair, the resulting map of fares from any given station is bound to look like Phil’s one.

  3. @ANDREW S

    I must admit the thing I like about the home-made zone map is the innovation of showing the platform numbers for the given directions as a compass rose.

    It’s also written out the platform number in words “ONE, THREE, TWO, FOUR” in the central white area.

    It’s also interesting to see that famously co-located stations Queensway and Baswater are 10p and 15p.

    Anyone know what the giant purple capital A is for?

  4. That zone map …
    “I don’t know where they got the idea from, but I think I was there first.”
    IIRC, it was because many European cities already had zonal fares & the idea was proposed to Ken L. by someone ( Please – can anyone remember his name? ) as a very good idea.
    IIRC, there was enormous opposition to the proposal on the usual exceptionalist grounds [ i.e. “It works perfectly well everywhere else, but it could not POSSIBLY work HERE!” &/or “It’s foreign” &/or “Not Invented Here” ]
    But Ken decided to pick up the idea & run with it.
    Corrections, amendments & more information welcome, as this is a piece of recent Lonodn transport history thatI think needs to be remembered.

  5. I can’t say for sure but whist it was Ken Livingstone who wanted to reduce fare by 30%, I think it was London Transport’s proposal to implement it with zonal fares . LT had long wanted to simplify fares but couldn’t find a way to implement them without some having to pay a lot more. The 30% reduction allowed the zonal fares with a commitment that no one would have to pay more. The Travelcard (zonal season ticket) was phenomenally successful, but true fareness (sorry) was only properly delivered when the Capitalcard covering BR as well as LT was introduced a few years later.

  6. @GT did the Buses not come first? A Conservative initiative in 1981 for flat fares – Fare Deal that Dave Wetzel tweaked to Fares Fair for greater public acceptance.

  7. If one is reviewing the introduction on fare zones in London then the complaint about the Stratford area being in two zones at the same time falls apart as the original situation was a ‘west end’ zone and a ‘city’ zone which overlapped substantially.

  8. Having been at the GLC at the time, my recollection is that London Transport opposed both zonal fares and travelcards on the basis that they would lose money on them. Even after the success of the travelcard had been demonstrated, LT opposed the one-day travelcard on the grounds that there would be excessive fraud because no photocard was needed. To be fair, this was during a period when the conventional wisdom within LT (and elsewhere) was that there was a ‘secular decline’ in the use of public transport which could not be reversed. When asked by Dave Wetzel if I agreed with that, I told him that I was all in favour of religious declines, but that secular declines were always reversible.

  9. Quinlet
    Thanks – “Dave Wetzel” was the person actually responsible for this amazing idea, IIRC – wasn’t he?
    I find it interesting that the “experts” were convinced that public transport was in permanent decline – presumably a carry-over from the mid-1960’s when such ideas were fashionable ( & profitable for some )
    Oh yes, love the pun.

  10. @Quinlet – that’s my recollection, too, from the other side of the fence, as it were. Within DTp, there were similar factions – John Palmer and the economists oppose both travelcard and zonal fares (mainly on the grounds that they were not “pure” enough in economic theory + in Palmer’s case, they appeared to encourage the use public transport) and pragmatists who thought that anything that improved pubic transport useage and convenience was a Good Thing – the only requirement was to get the pricing right. Getting the thing in place required some fairly nimble footwork and “fixing” the internal BR/LT liaison arrangements so that the whole thing appeared as a fait accompli by the time JP got wind of it.

  11. @Greg
    The idea of zonal fares had been knocking around the London Labour Party for some time before the 1981 GLC elections, so I’m not sure exactly who should be ascribed the original founder, but certainly Dave Wetzel, as chair of the Transport Committee, took the idea and ran with it.
    @Graham
    I always was of the understanding that Palmer’s appointment was (at least in part) because he took a ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ view that public transport would continue to decline and would keep the ‘enthusiasts’ in check. But you know far more of this than I do.

  12. @Quinlet – not really – Palmer had been the Undersecretary Railways for many years and when the Dep Sec Transport Industries was moved up to Perm Sec, his backfilling promotion was more or less inevitable. The other half of his DS empire – London, and sometimes ports. was very much the junior half and populated by a revolving door from the third XI. Palmer was certainly no pragmatist and on his promotion he revealed himself as having the most curious portfolio of prejudices.

  13. The focus of discussion in the London Labour Party prior to the 1981 GLC elections was on fare-free travel, so zonal fares didn’t really come into it. There’s no mention of zonal fares in the Party’s 1981 manifesto.

  14. https://www.scribd.com/document/152207038/A-Socialist-Policy-for-the-GLC-Labour-s-London-Manifesto-1981

    Fare-free was considered unrealisable straight away so steps were described.

    A relatively modest cut of 25% in fares initially avoiding the need to make a major increase in the precept by not increasing fares in following years the actual subsidy is increased and fares become relatively insignificant in real terms.

    The most modest option was to restore and maintain the 1976 level of subsidy in real terms. It would have some impact on both rates and fares maintaining a subsidy of around 31% with annual fare increases in line with inflation.

    The final option was the introduction of a flat fare system. This could be based on a single flat fare for every journey which would need to be about 15p or 1óp on the buses to produce the same income as previously. However this would tend to encourage longer journeys and discourage shorter ones. This difficulty could be overcome by devising a zoned fare system.

    The actual fares charged would need to be carefully worked out but overall could be set at whatever level vis-a-vis the subsidy the council wanted. To produce the same income as previously on the tube the flat fare would be 40p.

    Further naming individual architects of transport policy the obituary for Martin Mogridge credits him as a Transport strategist who helped to devise GLC’s ‘fares fair’.

  15. @ Aleks – bus zoning did come first in terms of being applied Londonwide. As already mentioned Fares Fair only introduced the West End and City zones for the tube complete with overlap around the Charing X branch of the Northern Line. It was the scheme to partially reverse the impact of the Bromley Council / Law Lords ruling that led to Travelcard in 1983 – branded as “Just the Ticket”.

    I have a scan of the Fares Fair leaflet on Flickr if anyone is interested. Be prepared to faint at the cost of fares back then plus wild ideas like a cheap Sunday flat fare.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/24759744@N02/albums/72157632882951244

    I am loathe to comment on the simplification issue because we clearly have informed comment from several quarters. I was given to understand that there were those in LT who did favour simplification of the fares structure but a few voices is rarely enough to outweigh what is said at Board level or by political controllers at the GLC.

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