The Global Citizen's guide to: London Transport (part 2)

Buying a ticket:

While other cities' transport systems strive for reliability, efficiency and ease of use, London's transport system prides itself on one thing only: consumer choice. Take Hong Kong, for example: a single Octopus card lets you travel on the metro, buses, ferries, trams, the funicular up to The Peak... you can even use it to pay for stuff in shops. Of course, in today's era of global market capitalism, it seems rather restrictive to have to do all these things using one single ticket. It would certainly never wash in a city like London. That's why London offers the widest imaginable range of tickets for travel on its transport system.

Nobody knows exactly how many different public transport tickets are available in London. It is said that a long time ago, a famous scholar found a mathematical expression to answer this question and scribbled it on the margin of a.... oh wait, no, that's Fermat's last theorem. OK, so really, nobody knows how many tickets are available, but let's do a quick calculation:

London is divided into 6 different transport zones, extending outwards from central London in a ring-like fashion. That gives 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 21 different combinations of single journey tickets within and between zones. You can also buy return tickets, making this 42. Children under 16 and the elderly receive separate concessions, so that takes the number up to 126. Of course, buying a ticket for every single journey is a pain, so there are a number of ticket options for multi-trip travel in the form of travelcards. These allow unrestricted travel within and between specified zones over a certain time period. For example, you can buy travelcards valid between zone 1 and all the other zones, so that's 5 different travelcards. Working out all the zone combinations, I figure there are 21 possible such travelcards, each available in weekly, monthly and annual varieties for adults, children and other concessions, making this 189. You can also get 6 different individual travelcards valid for one day and 2 valid over 3 days- that's 24 with concessions- plus 4 family one-day travelcards.

Just to recap, we're up to 126 + 189 + 24 + 4 = 343

Oh, I should mention that one-day travelcards are more expensive if you buy them during peak time, so that adds another 10. You can also buy a carnet (a book of 10 single tickets) for travel any time within zone 1. So now we're up to 354. Now, if you hold one of these travelcards, but want to travel outside your permitted zones, you have to buy an extension, of which there are 63 possible zone-age combinations. That's 417 now.

HOWEVER, some season travelcards are valid on the tube and on buses, but not overland trains, while some others can be used on all of these. So that's, let's see.....

Ok, I'm beginning to lose the will to live now...

But with over 400 different tickets to choose from, who could possibly be dissatisfied with London's public transport system? A couple of years ago, the Oyster card was introduced, and there was a great deal of concern, because this was supposed to let you travel on any form of public transport with a single charge card, thereby greatly reducing consumer choice. But eventually it was realized that this concern was unwarranted, because it would be impracticable to make the system compatible across the tube, buses and overland trains, so that rather than reduce consumer choice, introducing the Oyster card would actually increase consumer choice, because tickets would have to be made available in both Oyster and conventional formats.

So now everyone's even happier, because they have even more tickets to choose from.