The Tory Troll: Boris Johnson WILL double fares for London’s poor
But rather than attempt to increase the take-up he has instead decided to scrap the scheme altogether. This means by the mayor’s own figures, that around 75,000 of the poorest Londoners will now have to pay double for their bus and tram fares.
Posted on June 24th, 2008 at 1:12pm under Tories
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Whereas under Ken the price of a single Zone 1 Underground ticket went from £2 to £4 in just one year! (At least for anyone who didn’t like the idea of every journey being tracked by Oyster Card.)
Antipholus Papps’s latest blog post… Why Can’t They Remember Me For The Autobahns?
Okay a few misconceptions Antipholus:
1. Having an oyster card does not mean that you will be tracked. I bought a pay as you go Oyster Card from my local newsagent and as far as I know nobody is tracking me on it. Unless ‘the man’ is in league with my newsagent that is.
2. A single bus fare on the oyster is 90p. Cash tickets have gone up admittedly, but so what. Get an oyster.
3.If you’re a child or a pensioner then your travel costs were reduced by 100% under Ken. Boris has come into power and the first fare decision he makes is to increase travel costs for people on income support by 100%. Slight difference no?
As a non-Londoner, I hear a lot of moaning from the metropolis, but few specifics about how the oyster scheme actually works. So I have to ask: what’s the minimum charge for an oystercard, and how does it compare to the cash price of a single ticket? Where I live, a weekly buspass saves you nothing vs a five-day commute back and forth, starts to make sense if you’re making multiple journeys on top of that, but is a quite pointless extravagance if you only need it for a couple of days.
The trouble with that question is that the answers are many and varied according to the circumstances of the user: different zones, different charging schemes and so on. However, the price difference of the tickets is such that the simplest thing to do is just get one.
ejh’s latest blog post… Hallucinations
Thanks for responding Adam. While I’m not yet paranoid enough to think that anyone would have any interest whatsoever in tracking my journeys, the Oyster card does indeed log your journeys, the card is registered to me at my address (and I presume you had to fill out an application form for your newsagent), and Londoners were forced to use them by TfL raising the price of paper tickets by a swingeing degree. This is deliberate financial coercion to give the state yet more powers of surveillance and, in my never-humble opinion, wholly unacceptable.
Anyway, Justin is correct in pointing out that Boris is being a typically mean-hearted Tory bastard. I’m posting in response as someone who used to like Ken a lot and felt utterly betrayed.
This is deliberate financial coercion to give the state yet more powers of surveillance
No. It would be that if the purpose were to give them more poewrs of surveillance. It’s rather more likely that the purpose were to induce people to use something that TfL wanted them to use. If it were all about state surveillance, they’d have made it compulsory.
ejh’s latest blog post… Hallucinations
If you get a pay as you go Oyster card then you don’t give your name. That’s what I’ve got and i’ve never had any problems with it.
Adam’s latest blog post… What kind of value will Boris and the Tories give?
We both have PAYG Oysters and if anyone fancies tracking us via them it’s going to be interesting, since we usually just take the one with more credit on it, and, indeed, have occasionally met up and swapped over, in order to take advantage of daily price capping. Take that, TfL. As a people tracking mechanism it leaves a lot to be desired. As a convenient method of payment for public transport it’s pretty good, people visiting from out of town I’ve explained it to seem to think so, anyway.
Of course, the fact that bus fares were 70p/£1 when Ken took over and are now flat 90p everywhere doesn’t seem to find a place in the ‘Ken betrayed me’ argument. What’s the betrayal about that? Show me another city in the UK where fares are that low (the last time I searched I found one 75p fare in Glasgow). What about the reduction in fares on the London Overground last year from over £2 to £1? Betrayal my arse.
Tom’s latest blog post… Tube Cleaners To Strike