I have visited London just about every year for the last decade (apart from the covid years). We travel from our campsite into London by train, usually two days spread out during our stay, and always use the day travelcard. It is an extremely easy and hassle free way of travel for tourists, just hopping off and on while going to wherever we want to go. Axing this seems like such a step back. I've always lamented the lack of a card like this in my country while praising TfL for offering this card. Such a shame!
Indeed, a better option would be to cut fairs or even make public transport free. Ask Luxembourg about this :D Seriously, this will damage travel around London for tourists, especially those that for whatever reason do not use a contactless credit/debit card (there are good reasons to not have or disable that functionality). Oyster cards are not worth it for that segment of society. This will damage the economy overall country wide.
I'm not for raising fares, but it would seem more logical to keep the One-Day Travelcard and raise the amount TFL charge, adjusted for annual inflation. So they could collect what Geoff paid and actually create the incentive for MORE travel around London, rather than encouraging a single destination round trip to pinch those 2 pounds. I recently used a one week pass in Montreal for 5 days of travel that more than paid for itself AND got me to more places than I'd ever been before. Honestly, TFL, think ahead! BTW, that $42 card ($35 fare + card fee) included the $11 bus fare to YUL.
Removal of the one day travelcards is absolutely devastating for us, as we make weird journeys which the Oyster system doesn’t understand and so massively overcharges us for. Also, as the graphic shows, it saves money specifically in zones further out of London, making it more expensive to travel in the areas already being pushed out of their cars by the ULEZ expansion. From my local station in Zone 5 it costs £8 for off peak return to Zone 1 on Oyster, and £10 for a travelcard (with railcard) for the whole day - the choice is obvious. If both cars and public transport are too expensive to use, how do outer Londoners get anywhere? ~ Daniel (although all three of us think we day travel cards should stay) #SaveOurDayTravelcard
Oyster can’t actually overcharge (except in the case of a genuine software error or mis-configuration) since all possible charges between every start and end station on the network are published by TfL and one of those published charges will always be charged. Some people seem to believe that the Oyster system is clever enough to charge the user based on the actual route that they take. It isn’t. It will charge you one of the identified fares if your route matches one defined for that fare, otherwise it will charge the default fare.
The one advantage to travel cards is the lack of a time limit, you can stay within the system for hours without worrying about needing to tap out soon or any max fares.
Happened to me when I spent over 120 minutes travelling around the LU, LO, EL and DLR. Also touched in and out of same station and didnt realize both maximum journey times and same station exits accrues two penalty fares
One-Day Travelcard is great for those with severe anxiety or neurodivergent worries. Having a physical thing with clear writing on it stating they can freely travel without accruing any more costs can make being outside much easier. I've often advised people to get one-day travelcards even when I think it may be more expensive for them that day because of how it will ease their fears.
It's a valid point and it's often better to keep things simple and let the costs take care of themselves. People are going to travel less so revenue will fall.
True I would always buy a travel card even if it’s more expensive because I can relax a little more knowing that no matter what travel is taken care of.
@@clairewilliams9416 Claire, I agree and I think it's a bit short sighted to plan to withdraw such an excellent product. We need a step change and bringing people onto public transport which means high performance, reliable and economical to use.
This is one of the main reasons I have a monthly bus pass (Not in London, but logic is the same). If I have a bus pass I don't need to think if I'm getting 1 bus there and back and the ticket I need. I use to overspend on unlimited day tickets so I didn't have to worry if I wanted to change plans and say get the bus to the park or something. I tried the tap-on tap-off when we got it, got charged £6 (should have been £4.50, the cap price) and shockingly never used it again, it was just stressful.
while I get your point, i think it's a bit weird to single out severe anxiety or neurodivergent people, I think it's just that people find comfort in it and so logically the most vulnerable on that surface would prefer it. But its not a rule to apply or something - I'm neurodivergent and I genuinely couldn't care less, my obsession would revolve more around what's the cheapest option available lol
If TFL want to raise funds they could consider significantly higher road tolls. Making it more difficult and more expensive for people taking public transportation is the most braindead move they could make.
Its not really that straight forward. TFL doesn't collect enough revenue to fund is own costs. TFL's ticketing revenue covers less than half of their operating costs. Even with other sources of revenue generation (advertising etc.) they have a deficit of about a third which is funded by the taxpayer. Making public transport cheaper would mean more taxpayer subsidies. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing as arguably public transport generates public value (less congested roads = less pollution and TFL's network contributes significantly to the economic wellbeing of London and the surrounding regions etc.). But it is far from "braindead" or a senseless move. Its a fine balance determining how much should be costed to actual users of public transport and how much should be footed by taxpayers more broadly.
@@awild10 I live in Scotland and always put my Senior Railcard on my Oyster every time I renew it and in London. It gives you 1/3 off NR fares and also 1/3 of the daily cap. This only works for Oyster though, not contactless for non NR journeys.
For a lot of us who live outside London, the whole "tap on, tap off" thing is not a natural way of life, especially with oddities like stations without barriers. Many of us would much prefer to have one ticket that means "In zones 1-6? You're fine." I don't visit London that often to be fair, but this is certainly going to make me less likely to go in the future.
Indeed. It's stressful enough as it is but knowing I have one ticket for all makes it easier. Do I have to get one of these oyster cards? Can I tap in with a bank card? Seems to me people waving bank cards around is an invitation for theft.
A great example of how to persuade people not to go to London. As someone from Northampton, I've used travelcards for as long as I can remember, because I then don't have to worry about where I'm going and how to get there. I can change my plans based on what the weather is like, or just a spur of the moment idea. But now, I'm going to have to find out in advance how to even get an Oyster card, because they don't exist where I live. Then work out what I want to do and how to do it without paying over the odds. The probability is that I won't bother going as often as I used to due to the extra hassle (so ultimately, TfL actually lose out).
Very true about changing plans. For people who don’t go into London very often, I think the change makes the prospect of getting lost even more stressful as you could end up paying more by tapping to get out of the station to find where you are (if you’re using maps on your phone and are wanting to get internet signal). I do normally plan my trips in advance but the flexibility with the travel card is something that will be very missed by many people who just want to explore around London for the day.
I'm another Northampton traveller. Recently we have been travelling to outer London, taking a walk and coming back from another station-eg to the DLR south of Stratford and back from Woolwich. We have Oysters as well -They were for weekend trips- and we were told they included our Senior Railcards. On the above kind of trip we wouldn't get any discount for getting return trips from Central London and presumably we wouldn't get a Senior reduction on the DLR and the underground in central London but only on the Woolwich London Bridge section and Northampton to Euston. We would also have to remember to take the Oyster cards for day trips. And didn't I see they were planning to get rid of Oysters but carry on with the debit card system?
As @stevenrix7024 says, you can use an ordinary contactless bank card, just make sure you use the same one throughout, but if you use your phone to pay, you can't then use the physical card because you'll miss out on the caps: despite it being the card on the phone it actually has a different 16-digit card number so essentially 2 different cards... However, if you have a railcard, you can't add that to a bank card so you'll need an Oyster, but you can order one online then when you get to London find someone on the ticketline to add the railcard to the Oyster then you get cheaper journey fares & a lower cap.
On a visit to London earlier this year I used a Oyster Card and was shocked at how much I spent travelling around, in fact I even had to top it up during my visit. The next time I visited London I went back to using the Day Travel Card which is great value for money.
The one day card is fantastic for people visiting London. When I first visited London as a backpacker the one day cards were often pinned to hostel noticeboards when people were finished with them so others could go out without having to pay.
@@AndrooUK There's nothing wrong with someone who's already paid for their ticket giving it to someone else if they no longer need it. That isn't "not paying" for it. The ticket has been paid for. But the authorities hate that non-individual way of doing things. They want everything to be done on an individual basis.
The travelcard was the only reason I got to go to London as much as I did when I was younger. I grew up on the Brighton line and could get a super off peak thameslink only travelcard for less than £9 with my 16-25 railcard. It made going around London accessible and affordable even as a teenager. I looked and the difference between a return journey and that travelcard today is only £1.80. Less than one tube journey. A real shame it's going to be discontinued and push prices up there.
I was surprised by the price too. I live in Spain where for over a year now my son can travel for free to and from his university town(a 2 hour train ride away) and enjoy free travel around our city (Valencia) on metros and buses. I also have been paying half price for fares for a while too. The idea is to encourage people to use public transport.
@@katieoak2082 Here in the UK we have some of the new Yutong Electric buses at one end of the spectrum and old diesel buses at the other end. There does not seem to be the priority, urgency and investment to make all services electric now. Likewise we do have some excellent new Hitachi Electric trains but also some 20-30 year old diesel trains. Ticketing has also improved but there are a lot of deficiencies in the system creating friction to travel. Accessibility is a major issue - excellent at some stations but absolutely terrible at others.
@@katieoak2082 Any form of free transport in the UK would be denounced by both the ruling and opposition parties as ‘Communism’. Our country is in managed decline.
I'm so pleased to hear the plan to scrap the travecard has been scrapped! It really looked like it was the end of enjoying spontaneous travel and hanging out on railway stations of London. Long may it continue!
Of course the Government would bail out London just as they cancel "the North's" rail project because Londoners were whining about having to spend a few extra £'s a day on their travel expenses. shame on London, shame on the Tories.
one thing I learnt from this ... London transport is EXPENSIVE ... I travel 80km from the Central Coast to Sydney in peak for $9.31 one way, but maximum of $16.80 for the day, so less then the return in peak time, and then if travelling for the week the maximum to pay is $50 Monday to Friday, to convert this to Pounds at the moment is about a half so around 25 pound for the week , But then again, we were in UK and Europe June/July this year and we found everything is expensive, especially food and petrol cheers, Garry from DownUnder
As a nation England appears to have stopped moving forward and making life better for us all. I love the travel card for leisure travel, even more now that I have a railcard. I probably buy one at least half a dozen times a year with my wife. It is so convenient. I have experienced that same issue you saw where the card suddenly stops working but there is always someone around to let you through the barrier.
Until the time you find there isn't someone around (e.g. London Bridge) and you have to wait until you can push through with someone else through the luggage gate
@@AndrooUKthe withdrawal of the Day Travelcard will affect exactly the infrequent travellers you refer to. Commuters will have weekly, monthly or annual tickets so are not going to be affected
@@AndrooUK Maybe TfL should care about these people. Collectively they buy a lot of tickets, they generally use off-peak capacity, they come to London and spend money, and some older ones will figure out they can buy a straight rail ticket and hop on the buses for free.
You didn’t mention one of the biggest advantages of the travel card, one ticket, no need to worry about getting a ticket for any onward journeys. For a lot of people simplicity and convenience is worth a lot.
This is a really important point for anyone that lives on the Brighton main line. The travel card allowed you to leave London from EITHER the Thameslink stations or Victoria which was incredibly convenient if you were unsure of your plans. Furthermore the ticket pricing leaving London is so ridiculous, a single from VIC to HHE for example is MORE than a return from HHE to VIC
This is going to make travelling with children more expensive, becuase lots of TOCs have £2 child flat fares, which includes travelcard tickets. Once this happens, you'll have to buy them an oyster card for which you'll have to pay a deposit - and the child will be travelling on adult fares.
You can get a child discount on a regular oyster card, but you have to ask the staff to do it, and it's not advertised at all, it's only burrowed away on the TfL website
@@re_patel Sorry. I was talking about TfL services rather than national rail since cheap kids rail fares had already been mentioned for the travel into London.
I'm intrigued to see the analysis (or lack of it) regarding the value of the journeys to London businesses compared to the £40M cost per annum. Also, in a hybrid working age, it may well discourage workers based outside London in the Home Counties/South Coast from taking work in London, where the travelcard makes journeys easier and more cost effective. If we are looking to transition more fully away from vehicle use in London this is a most counter intuitive measure.
As others have said a Travelcard doesn't care if you miss a tap out or forget to tap a pink card reader or take ages travelling from one zone to another. I got 'maximum fared' at Victoria once when the gate staff opened all the gates to let everyone through after fans from an evening match all turned up at the same time and the Oyster pads were turned off. This resulted in me then not having enough balance left for the train to Croydon! Going back to the Travelcard, I fondly remember buying mine as a child from Mick the station supervisor at West Wickham who always cheerily stated to me 'that'll be 80 pence'. I still have a few old ones knocking about from the colourful tube issued ones and the pink 'Capitalcard' examples from British Rail.
As an American that has lived in the Kanto region of Japan for a couple of decades now the fare schedules of of the UK, and London in particular, confuse the hell out of me.
The other difficulty is if you're traveling on business expenses - you can buy 1 ticket that will get you where you need to be in London, rather than a ticket and somehow try to work out what you're owed on an oyster
I’m furious that these will be going, for someone who lives in the West Midlands this ticket is life and death when travelling around London for a day. I’m a rail enthusiast, and I gotta say our railways keep getting worse. Nice video though 🎉
We have a similar product here in Glasgow. It costs £7-40 for one day and allows unlimited travel within the old Strathclyde Region boundaries. So from Glasgow I can travel to Largs, Balloch, Cumbernauld and East Kilbride.
Following from my other comment, access to the network with this product is manual as none of the automatic ticket readers have been programmed to accept this ticket.
Are you talking about the 'Roundabout' ticket? I recently used them on a three day trip to Glasgow. All good, but you can't buy them from Subway stations, only from National Rail stations. I ended up having to pay extra for the first journey of the first day. After that I realised you can buy them in advance for the following day and all was well!
It's mad that that essential services like public transportation is expected to make a profit especially when there's little too no options apart from tfl services when traveling around London.
Yet no one demands that roads make a profit. If you charged these same people saying public transport must make a profit through fares tolls for all the roads they drove on, they'd be kicking off
It’s really not - if it didn’t make a profit then the service would not be as good, or else money would have to be taken away from, for example, the NHS, schools, and benefits.
They aren't expected to make a profit. They are just expected to keep the difference between revenue and expenditure reasonable. The facts are that the transport system (or, at least the train network) within London is not nearly as used as it was prior to covid. Working from home is a big thing and whilst most people have returned to the office part time, 3/2 4/1 office to home days are very common now. The services are all as frequant as they were before, the staffing levels haven't changed... just the amount of people using it (especially paying peak rate) is down.
@@tomwantshelpmost other developed counties subsidise public transport in major cities. New York for example only has fares make up about a third of revenues, most of the rest is government subsidy. And over there fares are a flat rate of $3, the trains are air conditioned, and the service runs 24 hours a day. Public transport doesn’t have to make a profit, it’s a political choice to make it so. And Britain is the only major country that’s made it
Britain is already f....d on transport due to every government making car the natural choice and pricing out trains... now this complexity too. In short every other Euro country is miles ahead of GB while Brits keep bending over to get f.....d
Living in Maidenhead, I've made good use of the travelcard. The change may not have a particularly significant financial cost. However, the real kicker is the convenience. At the moment, if I got the Elizabeth line, I can get into whichever station in London, Bond Street for example, and then just change lines without having think, or leave the station. While there is the option to use contactless from beyond West Drayton, you cannot connect your railcard to your contactless card, therefore this is much more expensive than the current travelcard. I would have to leave the gate at whichever London station I get the Elizabeth Line in to, to then scan back in with my contactless or oyster card, which is an incredible waste of time. While I could get a single ticket to one of the stations and make the most of the railcard discount, I would still have to then tap in in London. The only way this would logistically make sense is if tap in/out points are available at platform level, similar to on the DLR and Overground.
The one day travelcard is ideal for me going trainspotting since then I don't have to worry about the oyster card timing out and then charging the maximum fare. It also gives me freedom as well to travel around London without pressure. If the card withdraws, then my trips from Kent to London will be nearly 50 to 60 quid. Don't scrap the day travelcard TfL! Thanks for explaining whats going on Geoff.
Exactly. It's pretty much the main reason for me travelling to London, so I can visit the main stations for classes I can't see at home. Otherwise, it's a place I avoid if at all possible. Without the travel card, I can't see any reason to go to London. Getting rid of the best part of London seems very, very odd. It's actually a good few years since I went to London anyway, as the fare from the North West has increased vastly more than inflation since I used to go occasionally in the 1980s.
Back in the day I used to buy these and use them in REVERSE, for travel from London to interesting destinations outside of London. Usually a very good deal since you didn't have to pay for the Tube separately to get to the main rail stations, especially once adding a Railcard discount. Presumably you weren't *really* supposed to do them in reverse, but no ticket inspector ever called me out on it. Occasionally a ticket agent would insist you couldn't do it when I tried to buy it from them, but you could just buy the tickets online for pick up from a ticket machine so it didn't really matter.
UPDATE : On the 24th October TfL and Train Operators came to an agreement to keep the Travelcard, news story here - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67206255
I’ve Ioved and used the one day travel card for years when I’ve stayed in London. I’m so sorry to hear this. It was not only good value for money but so convenient as well.
Travelling in London can be stressful when you don't live there - even if the costs of travelcard vs non-travelcard were the same it's still much nicer only having to use one ticket. It's already enough to think about where you need to go and getting on the right platforms but now I'll have to juggle multiple tickets and hope I don't make any mistakes or lose one of them. I'm not even sure if I can buy the tickets I need at my local station anyway.
My dad is a train spotter and when he comes down to London, I've always just recommended he gets a one day travel card with his train ticket so that he doesn't get timed out of any journey if he sits on a platform for a long time. What would be the best thing for him once this is phased out?
that's such a good question Rebecca! i have been caught out like this before too! (sometimes just when i've had a long phone call on the platform of a station for an hour!). my only solution is to have a period travelcard ( a week, or a month ). i can't think of a solution that solves it for a singular day. :-(
I have experienced the timed out problem when previously attempting to use Oyster & advance singles in & out of London, that's why I currently use the One Day travelcard because you can take as long as you like, and go by any route reasonable or as a train nerd not so to get from any 1 place to any 1 other place without them.
One potential option could be a 'Cross London ticket' which should allow the use of the Tube. The main issue with that could be the single use of Outward and Return portions, and maybe some Tube stations wouldn't allow a break of journey to reenter. It depends on the specific plans, whether or not this idea would work well. If the locations to visit are mainly NR stations then I guess it could work perfectly well. If they are Tube stations then it might be a bit trickier.
So, for those of us who don't live in London and only visit, TFL have given us yet another reason not to visit. But the rail companies have a lot of form with this. I got a student railcard, thinking it would help offset the cost of my commute - unfortunately, every day my lectures started at 09;00, and the student railcard didn't activate until after 10.00. One friend was in a college where there was an offer that she could get a train from Aberystwyth to Birmingham (day return only) - and spend a grand total of 45 minutes in Birmingham before having to head home (she spent longer waiting for connections in Machynlleth and Shrewsbury).
@@thesmithersyThe Mayor doesn't control the rail companies. He tried to from the travelcard zone boundary but the government wasn't having it. They actually subsidize the rail companies a lot which is why they don't care about strikes. (You just reminded me there are train routes that just go through zones 1-6.)
As a family of 5 travelling occasionally to London and using the one day travel card this is heartbreaking news. We’ve tried oysters and they ripped us off. We saw no evidence of any cap and always touched in/out when we should. This news is a dealbreaker as I’m sure it will be for many visitors. Another point for progress I guess.
Nah. People will just put up with it, barely making any stink about it, except a few venting comments here or on XXX, I mean, regular X. We do it for everything important. We're spineless sheeple.
The fare cap doesn’t always work and people can get charged for incomplete journeys even if they’ve done everything correctly. I used to work on a gate line in London and even I used to get robbed frequently. I once got thrown out of Canning Town because of a fire alarm. I didn’t tap out because I was going to return to complete my journey. When I eventually finished my journey I found that I had been charged for two unfinished journeys. Thanks tfl
@@allanfstone I don’t have a registered oyster as I don’t think the government has any right to know where I travel. I would usually get tfl staff to sort out problems, but when you leave a dlr stop there are no staff.
Another problem is that due to the fact that it would be hard to do so, contactless cannot mix with railcard discounts. You can apply a discount to a travelcard or oyster but many people outside London don't have oyster unless they have a discount. Oyster should also be accepted at Reading to allow for discounts to non paper tickets as contactless is allowed.
The problem is that Oyster cards only have enough memory on them to cope with 15 different fare "zones", and they have all been used up. You can register a contactless card to a TfL account, so you should be able to link your discount card to it as well.
TfL are working on a plan to get railcards on contactless, as part of the Project Oval rollout of PAYG to the London commuter belt (and as far out as MK, Bedford, Cambridge and Brighton). Due in about 18 months...
@@katrinabryce Oyster had a fare zone reserved for Reading, but the effort needed to restructure the beyond-z9 zones to get it working effectively was seen as too much effort due to most people using contactless anyway. There are plans to improve Oyster underway, but they will take a while.
@@sihollett The Fare Zones at the moment are Bus/Tram, Zones 1-9, Heathrow (I think that is 3 different zones?), Merstham to Gatwick, probably more than one zone, Shenfield, Broxbourne to Herford East, Potters Bar, Radlett, and Watford Junction. Possibly some of these are combined as effectively zone 10?
@@katrinabryce I have already registered both my oyster and contactless. I now use oyster due to discounts (16=25 railcard) However, I dont think they will ever allow discounts to contactless due to the reasons above.
@@trickygoose2 But this is removing options, making things simpler and less need for explaining. You just need an ordinary ticket to London, then you by ordinary TfL transport as anyone who lives in London would. It's a worse deal, but it's at least much simpler to understand.
@@rjmunro it is simpler to understand in terms of ticket choice at your local station. However, once you had that ticket things were simpler because that is all you needed at ticket barriers fir the rest of the day. However, I suspect there have been occasions in the past when I have bought a Travelcard and then ended up only making 1 or 2 tube journeys.
When I worked in Guildford I travelled from Sutton, London and found that it was cheaper to buy a 1 day return ticket from Sutton to Godalming rather than Guildford, even though you had to change at Guildford to get to Godalming. You could get through the barrier at Guildford with a Godalming ticket. Also, buying a ticket every day 5 days per week was cheaper than buying an annual season ticket. It's worth checking if you're planning to travel between London and Guildford.
The Zone 1 or Zone 1 & 2 cap is already £8.10, so it's already more than the difference between the return to the terminal and the Travelcard. And if you're going to Wembley (zone 4) the cap is £11.70. When I worked at Kings Cross Thameslink a few decades ago, the maths was that the Travelcard for any zone combination (there was a 2 zone, a 4 zone, and an all zone version) was always cheaper than three journeys. If you were just going to a place and back in Zone 1 or 2, get a ticket for each leg. Three or more, get the Travelcard. It's an unwritten rule that LUL / TfL and the train operators have stuck to since at least the 1990s.
That's kinda how most places that have day pass work. A round trip or maybe a bit more pays for the day pass, and nowadays most systems I've been to just cap you automatically at the day pass rate when you tap enough.
I visit London fairly frequently and have linked my Senior Railcard to my Oyster card. This reduces the cost of tube journeys by a third. You can also use any English senior bus pass to get free bus travel in London.
Of course the One-day Travelcard has now been reprieved, so the video is now irrelevant. There will be a 3% increase over any national rail ticket price increase.
Oyster is okay for point to point journeys as you tap in and then tap out but what if you want to remain in the system for, say 2 hours watching the trains go by.... you can't as you have a time limit with oyster. With a paper ticket that was never a problem !!
@geofftech2 I'm afraid to say that this government are NOT interested in public transport. Its ironic really, crossrail's costs spiralled but we have ended up with a superb east-west metro system and everyone has seemed to forget the cost rises and delays yet HS2 costs spiral and the Birmingham -Manchester/ Leeds leg is scrapped !!.
I am flabbergasted that I was actually on that EXACT train from Guildford to London and I had no idea Geoff were also on it 😱 it’s the second such moment that week, Hideo Kojima visited Guildford 6 days earlier and I apparently missed him by only a few minutes too. I should be crying, but I’m laughing 😂
I've been using Travelcards to get to London since my uni days (the 90s) and they have been really convenient. If they really want to encourage the use of public transport, this probably isn't the way. I have actually travelled to London on an off peak return ticket (the Key on South Eastern) and then once there, used my Oyster card. It does cost more.
I’ve just returned from Barcelona where I took advantage of their excellent transport system. The cost for a day ticket is £14.21 and it covers buses, trams Metro and trains, the system is fully integrated and I had absolutely no difficulty finding routes to anywhere that I wanted. Isn’t it sad that our transport systems are not only very poorly integrated but also outrageously expensive.
Cheaper to travel in London for the day, everyone seems to forget tfl have daily caps. You can travel all day on buses for less than £6 and tubes and buses for less than a tenner...
The out-boundary zone 1-6 travelcards offer good value encouraging visitors and are both extremely useful and simple. I write as someone who lives outside of London and wants to visit; I suppose for Londoners who this will "matter" to in terms of politics it might be a different story. I guess visitors don't matter as much. Just one piece of card for everything that day - outward and return to London as well as the london area It's how I've visited London for almost 10 years, first recommended by the ticket office. This was before I was properly a rail enthusiast so this ticket isn't just for enthusiasts to spend the whole day on the cushions (or hard seats) like how some rail rangers/daysavers are. I've seen other people with travelcards too. Without it I would need to get a 2-part return ticket to London and then need to use an oyster card - less convenient and more complicated and of course more expensive (nice sneaky fare increase!) The main things that could go wrong on the travelcard is the magnetic stripe on the ticket breaking (as shown in the video 8:48 although for it to break that early is not usual for me, I've only had it break once or twice in my numerous visits) or going out of the zones/validity of the ticket. If it does break, it will be accepted by any member of staff on a manual inspection, no penalties. Whereas with Oyster you are in the hands of TFL's/your bank's technology. Make of that what you will. No time limits, no failing to touch out, no journey history for TFL to track, monitor or store or correct (whoops too long!) both convenient and private. If it's about money I get that it's a big discount (especially Birmingham, +£2) so how about raising the travelcard component of the deal by a few quid? The other reason to remove travelcards is perhaps to remove magnetic CCST tickets from the gatelines and force everyone to use oyster/contactless to save maintenance fees. However a) they seem to be reluctant to accept aztec code PRT which is becoming popular on the mainline - maltese cross through tickets are still all magstripe, and b) well if you split a through cross london ticket and the terminal transfer goes up the wall, will passengers be guaranteed a complete journey or be stranded at the london terminals?
I still remember when I was a kid in the early 2000s and it was £2 for a day travelcard that would allow for unlimited use of public transport all over London. Those were the days...
The first mistake was buying a ticket to zone 1, then using Oyster to travel around zone 1 and 2. Before you even left, you'd already paid for a return trip through zones 1 and 2 that wouldn't be included in the price cap for those zones!
Very interesting. I use contactless often and would like to advise that double touching ( for whatever reason ,) could land you a special fare of £6 ( on buses this is not an issue). Touching in and out of the same station ( no trains or you have just missed one) could also land you a special fare. There is no cap with special fares.
I'd like to point out that the removal of the One Day Travelcards will cause issues for people who had their cards (Oyster/concession, bank card etc.) lost or stolen and had to wait for replacement cards to arrive in the post.
@@kimberley27 yes you would the physical card but on Apple Pay it uses a different card number so you can continue to use Apple Pay even if you’ve reported your physical card stolen. That’s the great thing about it
I've just looked at my local station options. An off-peak Travelcard is only fractionally more expensive than a ticket to the first station in Zone 6 followed by a Zones 1-6 Travelcard from there (also arriving at Waterloo). Mind you, travelling one stop off-peak to get to Zone 6 is a £5.80 return! Someone really needs to look at ticket pricing as a whole, because it seems to make very little sense!
As a person who doesn't live in London but is from London the Travelcard is convenient for me on my trips back to London because I dont have to worry about things like Oyster Cards or if there had been changes in traveling from one zone to another zone its one card and Im all done for the day
ditto .. as a non-frequent London traveler, it was reassuring to know that, if you take a wrong train (or right train in the wrong direction), you were not going to be hit with extra fees
@@Martin.Ferrier if you only come into London a few times a year most people are not going to keep up to date with the London transport system because they dont need to but it know looks like they might have to to avoid making errors
@@danieldabloxgamer9205plenty of good reasons someone wouldn't want to use contactless. People don't want their journeys to be traceable to their bank account, or people like the elderly, children and students who are going up to London for the day and don't want to pay the full adult fare on contactless, or faff with oyster card discounts. The ticketing system is overcomplicated and user unfriendly as is, no need to make it more so
Thank you Geoff and Rodger. What an absolute shame the travelcard is going as it was so useful and easy to understand. I’ve never needed an Oyster card when travelling in - I’ll just have to use my contactless I guess. But, what do we do as a family? Do my children now have to get Oyster cards? It’s so confusing :/ Having spent some time holidaying abroad, our transport system pay structure is ridiculous (and hugely overpriced)
Very good question about children. It would be okay in my family as my sister is old enough to have her own debit card with her bank account so can use Apple Pay to tap in and out. But I can see it being more complicated for parents and their children when travelling around London. I reckon it would be easier for them to have Oyster cards but for people who don’t live in London or travel to London very often, I’m not sure if there is a better option.
I dunno, I'm not saying you're wrong about the London system being ridiculous and over-priced - it's all about personal opinion, but as an occasional visitor NOT living in the UK, I find London one of the most reliable and fairest systems of many places I visit all over the world - and cheaper than many too! At the same time Londoners seem to be the biggest complainers about their excellent system. The whole of TFL is extremely well integrated compared with most other big cities and I think the daily capping works really well and gives the flexibility to decide as the day goes on how many journey's you'll need to make. Most other cities require you to either buy a day ticket up front (if they even have one) or use single tickets all day - totally unflexible. Personally I only bought a day travelcard once and ended up kicking myself that I spent more than I really needed. Whenever I come to London I just use contactless and am very relaxed that I know what I'll pay and don't even have to worry about it.
Great research and entertainment, thank you! I'm not shocked how complicated the ticket structure is, off-peak, on-peak, to zone six, Oyster Card caps....it's like the faux supermarket bargains where they compare related products different, use flash sales when it was cheaper a few weeks before, and every trick in the book to fool you. Yeah, thanks TFL and your ULEZ alternative.
I'm SO glad that TfL finally saw sense and SAVED the One-Day Travelcard, albeit at at cost of a one-off price rise, but I can certainly live with that! 😁😁😁
Roger is always a great guest and knowledgeable about public transport. Maybe there is a series to do with him, something about busses? How they complement trains in the UK transport scene?
On the flipside - what we actually need is the publicising of the fact that these sort of unlimited journey tickets exist! A hell of a lot of people are unaware and so don't make the most of public transport because they fear they are racking up the costs. Great tickets. As are plus bus tickets for many cities and towns across the country (just two bus/tram journeys is generally enough for them to pay for themselves) - yet I've never seen another person using one!
I used PlusBus in Sheffield in the summer and one tram conductor remarked that they hardly ever saw them. But it was cheaper than buying a walk-up day ticket so a no-brainer really
@@orientalmoons well exactly. You can get a rail card discount on a plus bus ticket, too, so perfect if you have one of those! In some situations it's actually cheaper to get an advance single with a plus bus if you have a rail card than getting a bus/tram day ticket!
Though One Day Travel Cards in the London regions are very well known so people will know about unlimited travel they can do on various types of transport. One flip side for me is that it is actually cheaper for me currently to tap in and out compared to buying a travel card as I only ever do the obligatory rail return and maybe just one tube journey.
@@orientalmoons: Been to Sheffield multiple times on PlusBus, and many of the conductors didn't believe them to be valid. One of them once said they'd let me go with it, only to come back a few minutes later after checking it up to tell me I was right 😂
When we visit England I take my kid all around London with the one day travel card, gets him to learn the tube map, go the right direction, having a nice day out on the trains.
I love Roger's cool and calm demeanor. Also, stupid of them to take this mode of transport away. All major cities have a day pass like this. This is just a step back for a global city like London. Edit: any idea why Roger's card didn't work on that last exit?
We have a day pass and it’s done through oyster or contactless where you pay for single journeys but then once you hit a cap (daily travel card) you don’t pay more. There are also weekly and monthly caps. Obviously the flip side to this is positive as if you don’t travel as much in a day or week or month then you pay less whereas a travel card is something paid up front and use it or lose it.
If he put it in the same pocket as something magnetised, such as a phone case, that could've demagnetised the strip - it's happened to me before, and it's a hassle to find anyone to open the gate at some stations.
With any new video from Geoff you know a lot of what to expect, but it's always a welcome surprise whenever Roger shows up. So extra thanks for this one - both of you! I wonder if his paper travelcard went broken because of Roger reading the price of it too many times.. Anyway, that standing joke was hilarious!
The tips here are to end the mainline return earlier. Guildford to Clapham Junction (zone 2) return where many trains stop is £20, Guildford to Surbiton (zone 6) return is £15.70. With these options it can be even cheaper than a travelcard using the capping, if you have the time to get the slower mainline train, or can be smart about your journey.
If I'm understanding you, the issue here is you'd need to get off the train to 'tap-in/out' on oyster. Even though many larger stations have oyster readers on the platform, I can see this being incredibly impractical as dozens of people try to alight then reboard the same train to validate their oysters. This is going to cause delays and possibly be dangerous.
Not really. Surbiton is a big enough station, there will not be hordes of people doing it, and the number of trains going from Surbiton to Waterloo means you will be unlikely to wait any more than ten minutes for the next train. And Surbiton Station is quite a nice building to admire for a few minutes in the interim.
The super off peak return + travel card with a rail card was a life saver when I was a student in Guildford. Would have changed my entire experience of uni now it's going.
I just don't understand why the Oyster card can't be used anywhere where the travelcards were valid. There really should be just one card for anything.
Something that costs the transport provider revenue with massive savings dictated by central government - better get rid of it. It’s not the the gov dictated this ticket go, it’s that these are the tickets that lose TfL the most so the economics have had to kick in.
@@nick1635 Nope not sure he could. Not without the DfT agreeing, since the increase was on tickets sold by the rail companies and not by TfL. Price and revenue share are all government decisions these days so that option didn’t exist. In the second point, raising revenue elsewhere doesn’t cut any costs so doesn’t address the government request (and does nothing about the travel card losses).
I no longer live in Kent but the one-day travelcard is pretty much exclusively what I used to get into and around London for research trips and the like. I hope they don't withdraw it, although with the cost of everything else going up, I'm not surprised that's in the cards, so to speak.
It’s an even better bargain travelling from Crewe if you’re prepared to use the slower LNWR service rather than Avanti. I made this journey yesterday and the cost (with a senior railcard) was £34.95 with a travel card included. The return without the travel card is £33.10. Thus a bargain £1.85 to ride around London all day, which I did!
If it didn't cost you anything, then you're the product. I read too many comments. Did you spend any money on anything else in London? London is saying cha-ching sucker. Or you spent nothing, and saw a million cool things that you can't have or do. That's two quid of all day torture.
Geoff can you make another video showing the cost increases for those who currently use 'Two Together' or 'Family & Friends' railcards? These cannot be tied to Oyster so the cost increase are beyond maddening. Even trying to factor in discount Oyster for 18's or under (at a ludicrous cost per card) it's nothing but punishment for non-Londoners.
Regardless of whether it's cheaper or not in your example. My example is ALWAYS cheaper with a travelcard. I have the option of buying a travelcard for £33.10 or an off peak day return for £33.50. So they'll actually be taking away the cost effective option for me.
I used to use travelcards all the time, especially when I was a teenager and my group of friends really liked the flexibility of just going wherever on a whim (although it was ALWAYS going to Camden because we were a group of goths and adjacent creatures), but it's been a long time since I've used it now! I suppose Oyster/contactless just made a mix of journeys so seamless that it wasn't really relevant for me anymore. Sad to see the travelcard go though.
Interesting video - it's actually not as bad as I expected since I tend to stay in zone 1. Still not happy about it, though. Worth noting that if you're not going far, the "London Terminals" ticket to Waterloo could also take to you Victoria from Clapham Junction, or Charing Cross or London Bridge from Waterloo East. The automatic gates sometimes reject the tickets, but the staff will let you through. In fact, from Basingstoke, an "Any permitted route" ticket to London Terminals, just a few pence extra, covers Paddington via Reading as well .
2:22 Roger clearly explains the Government, led by the Tories, told TfL and the Mayor that a condition of the final bailout payment was to find between 1/2 billion to a 1 billion in savings in cost by the end of 2023.
I think the revenue share of these travelcards from remote stations were Londoners subsidising the cost of a visitor’s transport. That was the problem that needed to be solved to keep them available.
@@randommusic4567 That’s not how public transport works in most cities. Government funding usually plays a much bigger part. But of course you guys can’t do anything but hiss and seethe when you so much as read the word London. There’s nothing fair about it anyway, it was a political move from central government simply because their party doesn’t control the mayoralty.
I was afraid the travelcards would eventually bite the dust in favour of plastic. As a rail enthusiast I mostly use a travelcard to get to/onto mainline stations for photography etc, but except on travelcards that would incur financial penalties for being over the maximum permissible times for each journey made 🤬
I used this card so often when visiting London. Fixed price for a day and you didn't have to care about which mode of transport you use. The host family I visited back in 2019 actually used it to go to London at a Saturday and getting around the city the same day, too. It will cut off many people from doing those trips.
My local transportation has "blip your debit card" where you either pay for one trip (valid for an hour), but if you do it again within 24 hours, you get a 24 hours ticket. The disadvantage to purchasing a ticket through their app is that you always pay SEK 30 (rush hour rate, 60 for 24 hours) instead of SEK 26 (52 for a 24 hour ticket). But I think this is manageable for tourists, it is not a huge amount of money lost. (Enough for me to keep using their app though.) But this is just for one city zone. Comparing it with London would probably include the whole traffic area (three cities with a city area each plus zones outside based on distance between the stops you pass). And then it is a different can of worms.
This is just upsetting stuff really, While it will not affect Londoners at all. It WILL affect those of us living in the home counties just outside of the zones where if we are doing big things like several museum trips in a day, it will just be more expensive. Coming from someone like me living in Hertfordshire with a 16-25 railcard added onto my zones 1-6 ticket only cost £14 on weekdays and £10 at weekends. and oyster? well as a railcard I can easily applied online, adding my railcard to my oyster card is a complete hassle and I have to go into London to do it. Not to mention how its £9 just to get into a terminus one way as both my locals are in the "special fare zone". For a trainspotter, I shouldn't have a say in this because we were not the target for it, but it makes trainspotting and riding trains a lot more difficult. Heck, when there was the "have your say" before the decision, I mentioned trainspotters in a small sentence. But I mentioned heavily why this disadvantages everyone else and makes London less accessible as well as other cities like Manchester, Tyne & Wear Area and even Paris encourage the use of day unlimited travel tickets. Even their published results showed 90% of people responded that it was a terrible decision.
But you apply your oyster discount once, and the cap reduces by a third in the same day so it doesn't really matter? I think we are from the same area and it's definitely worthwhile getting the oyster Railcard discount! It's generally cheaper than a personal paper travel card from those stations
@@JoshLStuff The one issue me and some others are having issues with, even with oysters and PAYGO if we are train spotting we can easily get charged the maximum fare for going outside of the time limit or being on a odd route. I had it recently where for 2 jounyners Moorgate-Kingscross-Paddington-Moorgate. As I was with some people and also looking at some of the trains. I got charged a No tap out Moorgate-Paddington and a no tap in exit at Moorgate which cost me over 10 quid. TFL took ages to short it out and only recently was able to issue a refund for it. I find when transporting it is much easier to use a paper travel card as we don't get hit by the odd journey stuff. (Oh also I was only able to catch this as I had a Oyster card, anyone coming in and using contactless would likely not notice that unless they see it in their bankstatment some time after the issue.
@@D-049 That I can understand 100%. the oyster card discount is still worthwhile if the one day cards really do go away though, as at least some kind of reconciliation
It does affect Londoners too. I often take myself on a day trip to outer London, and an off-peak zone 1-6 Travelcard is £15.20 but with my Network Railcard discount it becomes £10. For my most recent day trip, the equivalent day return prices are £16.90 and £11.15. So even on just a return journey losing Travelcards is both a price increase for the traveller and I assume a reduction in the money going to TfL as now it's going to a TOC. On that occasion a return would have been fine for my plans, but had I planned stuff that had more journeys, as you can't put a Network Railcard discount on an Oyster card then it would have cost the £14.90 daily cap rather than the £10 Travelcard - so nearly a 50% price increase.
I really think this is a bad idea. People may find it harder to have several tickets, not everyone likes using a contactless card. Not everyone has an Oyster card, especially you live out of London. I have a railcard which also gives me a third off a travel card after 09:30
TfL pay a commission to the train companies for selling a travelcard on their behalf as well. Them removing it from sale means they get all of the money from oyster and card payments (minus bank fees). So they get more than just the extra user incurred cost of the travel. No commission to pay either.
I have visited London just about every year for the last decade (apart from the covid years). We travel from our campsite into London by train, usually two days spread out during our stay, and always use the day travelcard. It is an extremely easy and hassle free way of travel for tourists, just hopping off and on while going to wherever we want to go. Axing this seems like such a step back. I've always lamented the lack of a card like this in my country while praising TfL for offering this card. Such a shame!
same we camp at the site in Chertsey
@@Sam-gf6ue Do you begorrah .
Indeed, a better option would be to cut fairs or even make public transport free. Ask Luxembourg about this :D Seriously, this will damage travel around London for tourists, especially those that for whatever reason do not use a contactless credit/debit card (there are good reasons to not have or disable that functionality). Oyster cards are not worth it for that segment of society. This will damage the economy overall country wide.
I'm not for raising fares, but it would seem more logical to keep the One-Day Travelcard and raise the amount TFL charge, adjusted for annual inflation. So they could collect what Geoff paid and actually create the incentive for MORE travel around London, rather than encouraging a single destination round trip to pinch those 2 pounds. I recently used a one week pass in Montreal for 5 days of travel that more than paid for itself AND got me to more places than I'd ever been before. Honestly, TFL, think ahead! BTW, that $42 card ($35 fare + card fee) included the $11 bus fare to YUL.
Thanks lockdowns!
Removal of the one day travelcards is absolutely devastating for us, as we make weird journeys which the Oyster system doesn’t understand and so massively overcharges us for. Also, as the graphic shows, it saves money specifically in zones further out of London, making it more expensive to travel in the areas already being pushed out of their cars by the ULEZ expansion. From my local station in Zone 5 it costs £8 for off peak return to Zone 1 on Oyster, and £10 for a travelcard (with railcard) for the whole day - the choice is obvious. If both cars and public transport are too expensive to use, how do outer Londoners get anywhere? ~ Daniel (although all three of us think we day travel cards should stay) #SaveOurDayTravelcard
Would you give an example journey that oyster / contactless overcharges for?
What does 'time it out' mean?
@@re_patel By “time out” he means oyster will think they have done a very long journey but entered and exited at the same station.
very simple solution. add the railcard discount to your oyster card. thats 1/3 off every off-peak rail/tube journey immeadiately.
Oyster can’t actually overcharge (except in the case of a genuine software error or mis-configuration) since all possible charges between every start and end station on the network are published by TfL and one of those published charges will always be charged.
Some people seem to believe that the Oyster system is clever enough to charge the user based on the actual route that they take. It isn’t. It will charge you one of the identified fares if your route matches one defined for that fare, otherwise it will charge the default fare.
The one advantage to travel cards is the lack of a time limit, you can stay within the system for hours without worrying about needing to tap out soon or any max fares.
THIS
Happened to me when I spent over 120 minutes travelling around the LU, LO, EL and DLR. Also touched in and out of same station and didnt realize both maximum journey times and same station exits accrues two penalty fares
@@annabelholland The 2 hour max is quite annoying! If you're travelling across London and there's a delay somewhere - bad news.
ker ching££$
It's also bad for train spotting.
One-Day Travelcard is great for those with severe anxiety or neurodivergent worries. Having a physical thing with clear writing on it stating they can freely travel without accruing any more costs can make being outside much easier. I've often advised people to get one-day travelcards even when I think it may be more expensive for them that day because of how it will ease their fears.
It's a valid point and it's often better to keep things simple and let the costs take care of themselves. People are going to travel less so revenue will fall.
True I would always buy a travel card even if it’s more expensive because I can relax a little more knowing that no matter what travel is taken care of.
@@clairewilliams9416 Claire, I agree and I think it's a bit short sighted to plan to withdraw such an excellent product. We need a step change and bringing people onto public transport which means high performance, reliable and economical to use.
This is one of the main reasons I have a monthly bus pass (Not in London, but logic is the same). If I have a bus pass I don't need to think if I'm getting 1 bus there and back and the ticket I need. I use to overspend on unlimited day tickets so I didn't have to worry if I wanted to change plans and say get the bus to the park or something. I tried the tap-on tap-off when we got it, got charged £6 (should have been £4.50, the cap price) and shockingly never used it again, it was just stressful.
while I get your point, i think it's a bit weird to single out severe anxiety or neurodivergent people, I think it's just that people find comfort in it and so logically the most vulnerable on that surface would prefer it. But its not a rule to apply or something - I'm neurodivergent and I genuinely couldn't care less, my obsession would revolve more around what's the cheapest option available lol
I honestly can't say why I find details like this so fascinating, but I do, and it's this level of detail that keeps bringing me back to your channel.
ah, that's very of you to say - thank you! i find stuff like this fascinating too.
@@geofftech2oh what fascinating to me is what was the missing word in this comment. Nice….kind….nerdy? Lol
@@alexwaite7173 hmm, what's to me is what was the missing word in your comment! :)
bad sentence structure@@backwashjoe7864
It's a man thing : )
If TFL want to raise funds they could consider significantly higher road tolls.
Making it more difficult and more expensive for people taking public transportation is the most braindead move they could make.
they're keeping it now.
Its not really that straight forward. TFL doesn't collect enough revenue to fund is own costs. TFL's ticketing revenue covers less than half of their operating costs. Even with other sources of revenue generation (advertising etc.) they have a deficit of about a third which is funded by the taxpayer.
Making public transport cheaper would mean more taxpayer subsidies. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing as arguably public transport generates public value (less congested roads = less pollution and TFL's network contributes significantly to the economic wellbeing of London and the surrounding regions etc.). But it is far from "braindead" or a senseless move.
Its a fine balance determining how much should be costed to actual users of public transport and how much should be footed by taxpayers more broadly.
Why would they increase road tolls, no-one uses a car in London?
As others have said, you lose even more if you pay using a railcard. Shame Geoff didn't mention the railcard discount implications as well.
You can add some railcards to your Oyster. I have my "Goldcard" (fancy name for season ticket) on and it reduces off-peak journeys with Oyster by 30%
you are right, but worth noting that you can put a NR Railcard onto an Oyster card for discounted travel, but can only be done by TfL staff.
@@BobSmith-tb7rwbut how does that work if you use contactless payment by bank card or ApplePay?
@@BobSmith-tb7rw Agree for most railcards, but unfortunately the network railcard isn’t one of them
@@awild10 I live in Scotland and always put my Senior Railcard on my Oyster every time I renew it and in London. It gives you 1/3 off NR fares and also 1/3 of the daily cap. This only works for Oyster though, not contactless for non NR journeys.
For a lot of us who live outside London, the whole "tap on, tap off" thing is not a natural way of life, especially with oddities like stations without barriers. Many of us would much prefer to have one ticket that means "In zones 1-6? You're fine." I don't visit London that often to be fair, but this is certainly going to make me less likely to go in the future.
Indeed. It's stressful enough as it is but knowing I have one ticket for all makes it easier. Do I have to get one of these oyster cards? Can I tap in with a bank card? Seems to me people waving bank cards around is an invitation for theft.
There are plenty of suburban stations in London that don't have barriers. You just tap on the readers placed by the exits or side gate of the station
Literally
Not sure I agree - I live outside London & the buses around here now all let you "tap on tap off" - it's not just a London thing anymore.
@@vijay-c People who use buses on a day trip to London may never use buses at home.
A great example of how to persuade people not to go to London. As someone from Northampton, I've used travelcards for as long as I can remember, because I then don't have to worry about where I'm going and how to get there. I can change my plans based on what the weather is like, or just a spur of the moment idea. But now, I'm going to have to find out in advance how to even get an Oyster card, because they don't exist where I live. Then work out what I want to do and how to do it without paying over the odds. The probability is that I won't bother going as often as I used to due to the extra hassle (so ultimately, TfL actually lose out).
Very true about changing plans. For people who don’t go into London very often, I think the change makes the prospect of getting lost even more stressful as you could end up paying more by tapping to get out of the station to find where you are (if you’re using maps on your phone and are wanting to get internet signal). I do normally plan my trips in advance but the flexibility with the travel card is something that will be very missed by many people who just want to explore around London for the day.
No need for an Oyster card - you can just tap a contactless credit card to pay for your travel that way, I think.
@@stevenrix7024yep, unless you have a railcard, using a contactless payment card is functionally the same as Oyster.
I'm another Northampton traveller. Recently we have been travelling to outer London, taking a walk and coming back from another station-eg to the DLR south of Stratford and back from Woolwich. We have Oysters as well -They were for weekend trips- and we were told they included our Senior Railcards. On the above kind of trip we wouldn't get any discount for getting return trips from Central London and presumably we wouldn't get a Senior reduction on the DLR and the underground in central London but only on the Woolwich London Bridge section and Northampton to Euston. We would also have to remember to take the Oyster cards for day trips. And didn't I see they were planning to get rid of Oysters but carry on with the debit card system?
As @stevenrix7024 says, you can use an ordinary contactless bank card, just make sure you use the same one throughout, but if you use your phone to pay, you can't then use the physical card because you'll miss out on the caps: despite it being the card on the phone it actually has a different 16-digit card number so essentially 2 different cards...
However, if you have a railcard, you can't add that to a bank card so you'll need an Oyster, but you can order one online then when you get to London find someone on the ticketline to add the railcard to the Oyster then you get cheaper journey fares & a lower cap.
On a visit to London earlier this year I used a Oyster Card and was shocked at how much I spent travelling around, in fact I even had to top it up during my visit. The next time I visited London I went back to using the Day Travel Card which is great value for money.
The one day card is fantastic for people visiting London. When I first visited London as a backpacker the one day cards were often pinned to hostel noticeboards when people were finished with them so others could go out without having to pay.
That's great. Next, transport should just be free, then only all the tax payers will be shafted, not the people using it.
@@AndrooUKYeah, transport should be free. Good idea.
@@AndrooUK There's nothing wrong with someone who's already paid for their ticket giving it to someone else if they no longer need it. That isn't "not paying" for it. The ticket has been paid for. But the authorities hate that non-individual way of doing things. They want everything to be done on an individual basis.
This was a move against people visiting London, not people living in London.
The travelcard was the only reason I got to go to London as much as I did when I was younger. I grew up on the Brighton line and could get a super off peak thameslink only travelcard for less than £9 with my 16-25 railcard. It made going around London accessible and affordable even as a teenager. I looked and the difference between a return journey and that travelcard today is only £1.80. Less than one tube journey. A real shame it's going to be discontinued and push prices up there.
End of an era... I used to buy 1-day travel cards every time I visited London when I was growing up
Bought one of these today. Can’t believe they’re on the way out. For people who don’t live in London, they make travelling around Town so easy.
I live in the US but visit London often and find Geoff's videos helpful and delightful.
So kind, thank you!
Didn't realise how ridiculously expensive an off peak travel card from Guildford was!!!
It's London!
Did you know train travel is privatized? Then expect it to keep going up
I was surprised by the price too. I live in Spain where for over a year now my son can travel for free to and from his university town(a 2 hour train ride away) and enjoy free travel around our city (Valencia) on metros and buses. I also have been paying half price for fares for a while too. The idea is to encourage people to use public transport.
@@katieoak2082 Here in the UK we have some of the new Yutong Electric buses at one end of the spectrum and old diesel buses at the other end. There does not seem to be the priority, urgency and investment to make all services electric now. Likewise we do have some excellent new Hitachi Electric trains but also some 20-30 year old diesel trains. Ticketing has also improved but there are a lot of deficiencies in the system creating friction to travel. Accessibility is a major issue - excellent at some stations but absolutely terrible at others.
@@katieoak2082 Any form of free transport in the UK would be denounced by both the ruling and opposition parties as ‘Communism’. Our country is in managed decline.
I'm so pleased to hear the plan to scrap the travecard has been scrapped! It really looked like it was the end of enjoying spontaneous travel and hanging out on railway stations of London. Long may it continue!
have you got a source dor this please,
Of course the Government would bail out London just as they cancel "the North's" rail project because Londoners were whining about having to spend a few extra £'s a day on their travel expenses. shame on London, shame on the Tories.
one thing I learnt from this ... London transport is EXPENSIVE ... I travel 80km from the Central Coast to Sydney in peak for $9.31 one way, but maximum of $16.80 for the day, so less then the return in peak time, and then if travelling for the week the maximum to pay is $50 Monday to Friday, to convert this to Pounds at the moment is about a half so around 25 pound for the week ,
But then again, we were in UK and Europe June/July this year and we found everything is expensive, especially food and petrol
cheers, Garry from DownUnder
As a nation England appears to have stopped moving forward and making life better for us all. I love the travel card for leisure travel, even more now that I have a railcard. I probably buy one at least half a dozen times a year with my wife. It is so convenient. I have experienced that same issue you saw where the card suddenly stops working but there is always someone around to let you through the barrier.
England is moving backwards very slowly like slowly deflating balloon
Until the time you find there isn't someone around (e.g. London Bridge) and you have to wait until you can push through with someone else through the luggage gate
Is someone in your situation, buying only six tickets a year, really the type of passenger that TfL cares about?
@@AndrooUKthe withdrawal of the Day Travelcard will affect exactly the infrequent travellers you refer to. Commuters will have weekly, monthly or annual tickets so are not going to be affected
@@AndrooUK Maybe TfL should care about these people. Collectively they buy a lot of tickets, they generally use off-peak capacity, they come to London and spend money, and some older ones will figure out they can buy a straight rail ticket and hop on the buses for free.
You didn’t mention one of the biggest advantages of the travel card, one ticket, no need to worry about getting a ticket for any onward journeys. For a lot of people simplicity and convenience is worth a lot.
This is a really important point for anyone that lives on the Brighton main line. The travel card allowed you to leave London from EITHER the Thameslink stations or Victoria which was incredibly convenient if you were unsure of your plans. Furthermore the ticket pricing leaving London is so ridiculous, a single from VIC to HHE for example is MORE than a return from HHE to VIC
Unless, like me, you had bought a Thameslink only travel card which was cheaper
I'm going to start getting a train to/from east Croydon and tapping in there now.
Surely the biggest revenue increase for tfl is all the people forgetting to scan on the way out as most gates are open late at night
This is going to make travelling with children more expensive, becuase lots of TOCs have £2 child flat fares, which includes travelcard tickets. Once this happens, you'll have to buy them an oyster card for which you'll have to pay a deposit - and the child will be travelling on adult fares.
That depends on the age of the child. Under 11s travel free with an adult.
You can get a child discount on a regular oyster card, but you have to ask the staff to do it, and it's not advertised at all, it's only burrowed away on the TfL website
@@allanfstonethat is true for TfL services but most NR services are free for under 5's.
Only under 5 are free
@@re_patel Sorry. I was talking about TfL services rather than national rail since cheap kids rail fares had already been mentioned for the travel into London.
Roger is a gem, best guest on your channel, please more of him
I'm intrigued to see the analysis (or lack of it) regarding the value of the journeys to London businesses compared to the £40M cost per annum. Also, in a hybrid working age, it may well discourage workers based outside London in the Home Counties/South Coast from taking work in London, where the travelcard makes journeys easier and more cost effective. If we are looking to transition more fully away from vehicle use in London this is a most counter intuitive measure.
As others have said a Travelcard doesn't care if you miss a tap out or forget to tap a pink card reader or take ages travelling from one zone to another. I got 'maximum fared' at Victoria once when the gate staff opened all the gates to let everyone through after fans from an evening match all turned up at the same time and the Oyster pads were turned off. This resulted in me then not having enough balance left for the train to Croydon!
Going back to the Travelcard, I fondly remember buying mine as a child from Mick the station supervisor at West Wickham who always cheerily stated to me 'that'll be 80 pence'. I still have a few old ones knocking about from the colourful tube issued ones and the pink 'Capitalcard' examples from British Rail.
I wonder what happened to Mick?
As an American that has lived in the Kanto region of Japan for a couple of decades now the fare schedules of of the UK, and London in particular, confuse the hell out of me.
The other difficulty is if you're traveling on business expenses - you can buy 1 ticket that will get you where you need to be in London, rather than a ticket and somehow try to work out what you're owed on an oyster
Agreed, with a travelcard i just give them the card to prove the expense, with an Oyster, I need the proof of amount.
Very good point!
If your Oyster is registered, it might be a bit of a pain but you log into your Oyster account and print out your travel expenses that way.
@@nollys8523 spot on. For anyone doing expenses, the TfL app and journey record is *easier* as even less clicks required!
I’m furious that these will be going, for someone who lives in the West Midlands this ticket is life and death when travelling around London for a day. I’m a rail enthusiast, and I gotta say our railways keep getting worse. Nice video though 🎉
We have a similar product here in Glasgow. It costs £7-40 for one day and allows unlimited travel within the old Strathclyde Region boundaries. So from Glasgow I can travel to Largs, Balloch, Cumbernauld and East Kilbride.
Following from my other comment, access to the network with this product is manual as none of the automatic ticket readers have been programmed to accept this ticket.
Are you talking about the 'Roundabout' ticket? I recently used them on a three day trip to Glasgow. All good, but you can't buy them from Subway stations, only from National Rail stations. I ended up having to pay extra for the first journey of the first day. After that I realised you can buy them in advance for the following day and all was well!
It's mad that that essential services like public transportation is expected to make a profit especially when there's little too no options apart from tfl services when traveling around London.
Yet no one demands that roads make a profit. If you charged these same people saying public transport must make a profit through fares tolls for all the roads they drove on, they'd be kicking off
It’s really not - if it didn’t make a profit then the service would not be as good, or else money would have to be taken away from, for example, the NHS, schools, and benefits.
They aren't expected to make a profit. They are just expected to keep the difference between revenue and expenditure reasonable.
The facts are that the transport system (or, at least the train network) within London is not nearly as used as it was prior to covid. Working from home is a big thing and whilst most people have returned to the office part time, 3/2 4/1 office to home days are very common now. The services are all as frequant as they were before, the staffing levels haven't changed... just the amount of people using it (especially paying peak rate) is down.
@@tomwantshelpmost other developed counties subsidise public transport in major cities. New York for example only has fares make up about a third of revenues, most of the rest is government subsidy. And over there fares are a flat rate of $3, the trains are air conditioned, and the service runs 24 hours a day. Public transport doesn’t have to make a profit, it’s a political choice to make it so. And Britain is the only major country that’s made it
Britain is already f....d on transport due to every government making car the natural choice and pricing out trains... now this complexity too. In short every other Euro country is miles ahead of GB while Brits keep bending over to get f.....d
Living in Maidenhead, I've made good use of the travelcard. The change may not have a particularly significant financial cost. However, the real kicker is the convenience. At the moment, if I got the Elizabeth line, I can get into whichever station in London, Bond Street for example, and then just change lines without having think, or leave the station. While there is the option to use contactless from beyond West Drayton, you cannot connect your railcard to your contactless card, therefore this is much more expensive than the current travelcard. I would have to leave the gate at whichever London station I get the Elizabeth Line in to, to then scan back in with my contactless or oyster card, which is an incredible waste of time. While I could get a single ticket to one of the stations and make the most of the railcard discount, I would still have to then tap in in London.
The only way this would logistically make sense is if tap in/out points are available at platform level, similar to on the DLR and Overground.
The one day travelcard is ideal for me going trainspotting since then I don't have to worry about the oyster card timing out and then charging the maximum fare. It also gives me freedom as well to travel around London without pressure. If the card withdraws, then my trips from Kent to London will be nearly 50 to 60 quid. Don't scrap the day travelcard TfL! Thanks for explaining whats going on Geoff.
Yep, make the most of trainspotting in London while you can
@@SlowLineTrainspotting yep looks like it. Such a shame, I love visiting many stations in and around the City. Met a good few people as well
Exactly. It's pretty much the main reason for me travelling to London, so I can visit the main stations for classes I can't see at home. Otherwise, it's a place I avoid if at all possible. Without the travel card, I can't see any reason to go to London. Getting rid of the best part of London seems very, very odd. It's actually a good few years since I went to London anyway, as the fare from the North West has increased vastly more than inflation since I used to go occasionally in the 1980s.
You'll have to come in on an all day return, then purchase an Oyster to top up. Most London small grocers and newsagents sell them.
@@julianaylor43512 cards..such progress
Back in the day I used to buy these and use them in REVERSE, for travel from London to interesting destinations outside of London. Usually a very good deal since you didn't have to pay for the Tube separately to get to the main rail stations, especially once adding a Railcard discount. Presumably you weren't *really* supposed to do them in reverse, but no ticket inspector ever called me out on it. Occasionally a ticket agent would insist you couldn't do it when I tried to buy it from them, but you could just buy the tickets online for pick up from a ticket machine so it didn't really matter.
I can't see why using them in reverse would be against the rules, it makes sense to me
If anything, there's the boundary extension tickets which will cover you from a certain zone outwards, at the very least it's in the spirit of that...
You can do the same with air tickets. odd but it works
I'm shocked at how expensive the one day card is. In Sydney the off-peak daily cap is $8.40.
Britain is a scam
UPDATE : On the 24th October TfL and Train Operators came to an agreement to keep the Travelcard, news story here - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67206255
@@bartsimho1192 ta! Makes sense now!
I’ve Ioved and used the one day travel card for years when I’ve stayed in London. I’m so sorry to hear this. It was not only good value for money but so convenient as well.
Travelling in London can be stressful when you don't live there - even if the costs of travelcard vs non-travelcard were the same it's still much nicer only having to use one ticket. It's already enough to think about where you need to go and getting on the right platforms but now I'll have to juggle multiple tickets and hope I don't make any mistakes or lose one of them. I'm not even sure if I can buy the tickets I need at my local station anyway.
My dad is a train spotter and when he comes down to London, I've always just recommended he gets a one day travel card with his train ticket so that he doesn't get timed out of any journey if he sits on a platform for a long time. What would be the best thing for him once this is phased out?
that's such a good question Rebecca! i have been caught out like this before too! (sometimes just when i've had a long phone call on the platform of a station for an hour!). my only solution is to have a period travelcard ( a week, or a month ). i can't think of a solution that solves it for a singular day. :-(
Err, take up bird watching?
I have experienced the timed out problem when previously attempting to use Oyster & advance singles in & out of London, that's why I currently use the One Day travelcard because you can take as long as you like, and go by any route reasonable or as a train nerd not so to get from any 1 place to any 1 other place without them.
One potential option could be a 'Cross London ticket' which should allow the use of the Tube.
The main issue with that could be the single use of Outward and Return portions, and maybe some Tube stations wouldn't allow a break of journey to reenter.
It depends on the specific plans, whether or not this idea would work well. If the locations to visit are mainly NR stations then I guess it could work perfectly well. If they are Tube stations then it might be a bit trickier.
Do the caps help with timeouts?
as of writing this comment this video is #21 on trending and I don't think I've seen one of your videos on trending before well done Geoff👏👏
So, for those of us who don't live in London and only visit, TFL have given us yet another reason not to visit.
But the rail companies have a lot of form with this. I got a student railcard, thinking it would help offset the cost of my commute - unfortunately, every day my lectures started at 09;00, and the student railcard didn't activate until after 10.00. One friend was in a college where there was an offer that she could get a train from Aberystwyth to Birmingham (day return only) - and spend a grand total of 45 minutes in Birmingham before having to head home (she spent longer waiting for connections in Machynlleth and Shrewsbury).
Yes my rail card is useless for most of my journeys commuting into London for work
@@nearestyoutube True, only disabled person's railcards give a discount at all times of the day.
It's not the rail companies to blame for this, it's the Mayor of London.
@@thesmithersy no, it is the rail companies. I'm from outside London and rail fares are ridiculous for what is a third world service.
@@thesmithersyThe Mayor doesn't control the rail companies. He tried to from the travelcard zone boundary but the government wasn't having it. They actually subsidize the rail companies a lot which is why they don't care about strikes. (You just reminded me there are train routes that just go through zones 1-6.)
As a family of 5 travelling occasionally to London and using the one day travel card this is heartbreaking news. We’ve tried oysters and they ripped us off. We saw no evidence of any cap and always touched in/out when we should. This news is a dealbreaker as I’m sure it will be for many visitors. Another point for progress I guess.
There seems to be a lot of teething problems with touch on/touch off and First Bus are not being up front about the issues.
Nah. People will just put up with it, barely making any stink about it, except a few venting comments here or on XXX, I mean, regular X.
We do it for everything important. We're spineless sheeple.
@@AndrooUK I’m not so sure. He’s really annoyed a lot of Surrey people. That never ends well as they have a lot of clout
I live in Limehouse and travel to and from central every day, I use an oyster and actually rarely have any problems with it
It'll kill tourism. @@krob2327
The fare cap doesn’t always work and people can get charged for incomplete journeys even if they’ve done everything correctly. I used to work on a gate line in London and even I used to get robbed frequently. I once got thrown out of Canning Town because of a fire alarm. I didn’t tap out because I was going to return to complete my journey. When I eventually finished my journey I found that I had been charged for two unfinished journeys. Thanks tfl
I assume you didn’t ring them up and get the refund then?
@@allanfstone I don’t have a registered oyster as I don’t think the government has any right to know where I travel. I would usually get tfl staff to sort out problems, but when you leave a dlr stop there are no staff.
@@paulmasterson386You can get a refund via the website
What is safe to say is that it is way more expensive than the other European capital cities.
Another problem is that due to the fact that it would be hard to do so, contactless cannot mix with railcard discounts. You can apply a discount to a travelcard or oyster but many people outside London don't have oyster unless they have a discount. Oyster should also be accepted at Reading to allow for discounts to non paper tickets as contactless is allowed.
The problem is that Oyster cards only have enough memory on them to cope with 15 different fare "zones", and they have all been used up.
You can register a contactless card to a TfL account, so you should be able to link your discount card to it as well.
TfL are working on a plan to get railcards on contactless, as part of the Project Oval rollout of PAYG to the London commuter belt (and as far out as MK, Bedford, Cambridge and Brighton). Due in about 18 months...
@@katrinabryce Oyster had a fare zone reserved for Reading, but the effort needed to restructure the beyond-z9 zones to get it working effectively was seen as too much effort due to most people using contactless anyway. There are plans to improve Oyster underway, but they will take a while.
@@sihollett The Fare Zones at the moment are Bus/Tram, Zones 1-9, Heathrow (I think that is 3 different zones?), Merstham to Gatwick, probably more than one zone, Shenfield, Broxbourne to Herford East, Potters Bar, Radlett, and Watford Junction. Possibly some of these are combined as effectively zone 10?
@@katrinabryce I have already registered both my oyster and contactless. I now use oyster due to discounts (16=25 railcard) However, I dont think they will ever allow discounts to contactless due to the reasons above.
Another reason to keep the ticket offices at local stations.
Shout out to the people at Oxford who helped us get to Stratford Upon Avon.
What have ticket offices got to do with it?
I think because many people find that staff are better at explaining your ticket options than machines are.
@@trickygoose2 But this is removing options, making things simpler and less need for explaining. You just need an ordinary ticket to London, then you by ordinary TfL transport as anyone who lives in London would. It's a worse deal, but it's at least much simpler to understand.
@@rjmunro it is simpler to understand in terms of ticket choice at your local station. However, once you had that ticket things were simpler because that is all you needed at ticket barriers fir the rest of the day.
However, I suspect there have been occasions in the past when I have bought a Travelcard and then ended up only making 1 or 2 tube journeys.
@@rjmunro the ticket office staff know the ticket system tbetter than most of do and the difference between the cheapeest and most expensive is large
that's horrible! Why are the government determined to make us pay more for travel?!
You should stay in your own 15 minute city and be happy....
@@InverhavonRailways Indeed..
@@InverhavonRailways Tin-foil hat nonsense.
When I worked in Guildford I travelled from Sutton, London and found that it was cheaper to buy a 1 day return ticket from Sutton to Godalming rather than Guildford, even though you had to change at Guildford to get to Godalming. You could get through the barrier at Guildford with a Godalming ticket. Also, buying a ticket every day 5 days per week was cheaper than buying an annual season ticket. It's worth checking if you're planning to travel between London and Guildford.
The 5 days a week being cheaper than annual just seems silly. How does the weekly pass compare to 5 days, at the full rate?
This just goes to show how ridiculous the whole fare structure has become! I don't have the time to find oddities like this.
The Zone 1 or Zone 1 & 2 cap is already £8.10, so it's already more than the difference between the return to the terminal and the Travelcard. And if you're going to Wembley (zone 4) the cap is £11.70.
When I worked at Kings Cross Thameslink a few decades ago, the maths was that the Travelcard for any zone combination (there was a 2 zone, a 4 zone, and an all zone version) was always cheaper than three journeys. If you were just going to a place and back in Zone 1 or 2, get a ticket for each leg. Three or more, get the Travelcard. It's an unwritten rule that LUL / TfL and the train operators have stuck to since at least the 1990s.
That's kinda how most places that have day pass work. A round trip or maybe a bit more pays for the day pass, and nowadays most systems I've been to just cap you automatically at the day pass rate when you tap enough.
I visit London fairly frequently and have linked my Senior Railcard to my Oyster card. This reduces the cost of tube journeys by a third.
You can also use any English senior bus pass to get free bus travel in London.
Of course the One-day Travelcard has now been reprieved, so the video is now irrelevant. There will be a 3% increase over any national rail ticket price increase.
Has it ? Checking this, i see Oyster info and Travel card info
@@sianwarwick633???
Oyster is okay for point to point journeys as you tap in and then tap out but what if you want to remain in the system for, say 2 hours watching the trains go by.... you can't as you have a time limit with oyster. With a paper ticket that was never a problem !!
@geofftech2 I'm afraid to say that this government are NOT interested in public transport. Its ironic really, crossrail's costs spiralled but we have ended up with a superb east-west metro system and everyone has seemed to forget the cost rises and delays yet HS2 costs spiral and the Birmingham -Manchester/ Leeds leg is scrapped !!.
I am flabbergasted that I was actually on that EXACT train from Guildford to London and I had no idea Geoff were also on it 😱 it’s the second such moment that week, Hideo Kojima visited Guildford 6 days earlier and I apparently missed him by only a few minutes too. I should be crying, but I’m laughing 😂
I've been using Travelcards to get to London since my uni days (the 90s) and they have been really convenient. If they really want to encourage the use of public transport, this probably isn't the way. I have actually travelled to London on an off peak return ticket (the Key on South Eastern) and then once there, used my Oyster card. It does cost more.
I’ve just returned from Barcelona where I took advantage of their excellent transport system. The cost for a day ticket is £14.21 and it covers buses, trams Metro and trains, the system is fully integrated and I had absolutely no difficulty finding routes to anywhere that I wanted. Isn’t it sad that our transport systems are not only very poorly integrated but also outrageously expensive.
Cheaper to travel in London for the day, everyone seems to forget tfl have daily caps. You can travel all day on buses for less than £6 and tubes and buses for less than a tenner...
£14.21?. Is that supposed to be cheap?
Its going to be very expensive for people outside London to travel into london
The out-boundary zone 1-6 travelcards offer good value encouraging visitors and are both extremely useful and simple.
I write as someone who lives outside of London and wants to visit; I suppose for Londoners who this will "matter" to in terms of politics it might be a different story. I guess visitors don't matter as much.
Just one piece of card for everything that day - outward and return to London as well as the london area
It's how I've visited London for almost 10 years, first recommended by the ticket office. This was before I was properly a rail enthusiast so this ticket isn't just for enthusiasts to spend the whole day on the cushions (or hard seats) like how some rail rangers/daysavers are. I've seen other people with travelcards too.
Without it I would need to get a 2-part return ticket to London and then need to use an oyster card - less convenient and more complicated and of course more expensive (nice sneaky fare increase!)
The main things that could go wrong on the travelcard is the magnetic stripe on the ticket breaking (as shown in the video 8:48 although for it to break that early is not usual for me, I've only had it break once or twice in my numerous visits) or going out of the zones/validity of the ticket. If it does break, it will be accepted by any member of staff on a manual inspection, no penalties. Whereas with Oyster you are in the hands of TFL's/your bank's technology. Make of that what you will.
No time limits, no failing to touch out, no journey history for TFL to track, monitor or store or correct (whoops too long!) both convenient and private.
If it's about money I get that it's a big discount (especially Birmingham, +£2) so how about raising the travelcard component of the deal by a few quid?
The other reason to remove travelcards is perhaps to remove magnetic CCST tickets from the gatelines and force everyone to use oyster/contactless to save maintenance fees. However a) they seem to be reluctant to accept aztec code PRT which is becoming popular on the mainline - maltese cross through tickets are still all magstripe, and b) well if you split a through cross london ticket and the terminal transfer goes up the wall, will passengers be guaranteed a complete journey or be stranded at the london terminals?
I still remember when I was a kid in the early 2000s and it was £2 for a day travelcard that would allow for unlimited use of public transport all over London. Those were the days...
The first mistake was buying a ticket to zone 1, then using Oyster to travel around zone 1 and 2. Before you even left, you'd already paid for a return trip through zones 1 and 2 that wouldn't be included in the price cap for those zones!
Thinking of my grandma who is quite elderly and not happy using just bank cards. She wants a paper ticket.This is a nightmare.
Use CASH EVERYWHERE.
A paper travelcard also allows you avoid the Heathrow surcharge when travelling to the airport on the Elizabeth line.
Very interesting. I use contactless often and would like to advise that double touching ( for whatever reason ,) could land you a special fare of £6 ( on buses this is not an issue). Touching in and out of the same station ( no trains or you have just missed one) could also land you a special fare. There is no cap with special fares.
Is there a time limit on double touching?
You have a month to claim a refund usually.
F. contactless and oyster - travel tracking.
Pay CASH everywhere you go, no kard or phone payment people.
I'd like to point out that the removal of the One Day Travelcards will cause issues for people who had their cards (Oyster/concession, bank card etc.) lost or stolen and had to wait for replacement cards to arrive in the post.
Using Apple Pay/Google pay on your phone remedies that as you can still use your card on your device even if the physical card has been stolen.
@@jacksebsmithThat’s true but wouldn’t you cancel your card if you’d lost or had it stolen from you?
@@kimberley27 yes you would the physical card but on Apple Pay it uses a different card number so you can continue to use Apple Pay even if you’ve reported your physical card stolen. That’s the great thing about it
I've just looked at my local station options. An off-peak Travelcard is only fractionally more expensive than a ticket to the first station in Zone 6 followed by a Zones 1-6 Travelcard from there (also arriving at Waterloo). Mind you, travelling one stop off-peak to get to Zone 6 is a £5.80 return! Someone really needs to look at ticket pricing as a whole, because it seems to make very little sense!
As a person who doesn't live in London but is from London the Travelcard is convenient for me on my trips back to London because I dont have to worry about things like Oyster Cards or if there had been changes in traveling from one zone to another zone its one card and Im all done for the day
Ayy there's always regular contactless
ditto .. as a non-frequent London traveler, it was reassuring to know that, if you take a wrong train (or right train in the wrong direction), you were not going to be hit with extra fees
@@Martin.Ferrier if you only come into London a few times a year most people are not going to keep up to date with the London transport system because they dont need to but it know looks like they might have to to avoid making errors
@@danieldabloxgamer9205plenty of good reasons someone wouldn't want to use contactless. People don't want their journeys to be traceable to their bank account, or people like the elderly, children and students who are going up to London for the day and don't want to pay the full adult fare on contactless, or faff with oyster card discounts. The ticketing system is overcomplicated and user unfriendly as is, no need to make it more so
Just use a contactless debit or credit card. You don’t have to pre pay like Oyster.
Thank you Geoff and Rodger. What an absolute shame the travelcard is going as it was so useful and easy to understand. I’ve never needed an Oyster card when travelling in - I’ll just have to use my contactless I guess.
But, what do we do as a family? Do my children now have to get Oyster cards? It’s so confusing :/
Having spent some time holidaying abroad, our transport system pay structure is ridiculous (and hugely overpriced)
Very good question about children. It would be okay in my family as my sister is old enough to have her own debit card with her bank account so can use Apple Pay to tap in and out. But I can see it being more complicated for parents and their children when travelling around London. I reckon it would be easier for them to have Oyster cards but for people who don’t live in London or travel to London very often, I’m not sure if there is a better option.
I dunno, I'm not saying you're wrong about the London system being ridiculous and over-priced - it's all about personal opinion, but as an occasional visitor NOT living in the UK, I find London one of the most reliable and fairest systems of many places I visit all over the world - and cheaper than many too! At the same time Londoners seem to be the biggest complainers about their excellent system. The whole of TFL is extremely well integrated compared with most other big cities and I think the daily capping works really well and gives the flexibility to decide as the day goes on how many journey's you'll need to make. Most other cities require you to either buy a day ticket up front (if they even have one) or use single tickets all day - totally unflexible. Personally I only bought a day travelcard once and ended up kicking myself that I spent more than I really needed. Whenever I come to London I just use contactless and am very relaxed that I know what I'll pay and don't even have to worry about it.
Ha! Roger is THE Roger - RF (Roger French rather than Regal Four). Retired GM of Brighton Buses if i'm not mistaken!
he has a blog over at here, if you want to read more! -> busandtrainuser.com/
Great research and entertainment, thank you! I'm not shocked how complicated the ticket structure is, off-peak, on-peak, to zone six, Oyster Card caps....it's like the faux supermarket bargains where they compare related products different, use flash sales when it was cheaper a few weeks before, and every trick in the book to fool you. Yeah, thanks TFL and your ULEZ alternative.
I'm SO glad that TfL finally saw sense and SAVED the One-Day Travelcard, albeit at at cost of a one-off price rise, but I can certainly live with that! 😁😁😁
Roger is always a great guest and knowledgeable about public transport. Maybe there is a series to do with him, something about busses? How they complement trains in the UK transport scene?
On the flipside - what we actually need is the publicising of the fact that these sort of unlimited journey tickets exist! A hell of a lot of people are unaware and so don't make the most of public transport because they fear they are racking up the costs. Great tickets. As are plus bus tickets for many cities and towns across the country (just two bus/tram journeys is generally enough for them to pay for themselves) - yet I've never seen another person using one!
I used PlusBus in Sheffield in the summer and one tram conductor remarked that they hardly ever saw them. But it was cheaper than buying a walk-up day ticket so a no-brainer really
@@orientalmoons well exactly. You can get a rail card discount on a plus bus ticket, too, so perfect if you have one of those! In some situations it's actually cheaper to get an advance single with a plus bus if you have a rail card than getting a bus/tram day ticket!
Though One Day Travel Cards in the London regions are very well known so people will know about unlimited travel they can do on various types of transport. One flip side for me is that it is actually cheaper for me currently to tap in and out compared to buying a travel card as I only ever do the obligatory rail return and maybe just one tube journey.
@@orientalmoons: Been to Sheffield multiple times on PlusBus, and many of the conductors didn't believe them to be valid. One of them once said they'd let me go with it, only to come back a few minutes later after checking it up to tell me I was right 😂
When we visit England I take my kid all around London with the one day travel card, gets him to learn the tube map, go the right direction, having a nice day out on the trains.
I love Roger's cool and calm demeanor. Also, stupid of them to take this mode of transport away. All major cities have a day pass like this. This is just a step back for a global city like London.
Edit: any idea why Roger's card didn't work on that last exit?
We have a day pass and it’s done through oyster or contactless where you pay for single journeys but then once you hit a cap (daily travel card) you don’t pay more. There are also weekly and monthly caps. Obviously the flip side to this is positive as if you don’t travel as much in a day or week or month then you pay less whereas a travel card is something paid up front and use it or lose it.
If he put it in the same pocket as something magnetised, such as a phone case, that could've demagnetised the strip - it's happened to me before, and it's a hassle to find anyone to open the gate at some stations.
Roger's card was rejected by the fashion police which was unfair as Geoff's blonde streak got through
I use the one day travel cards a lot and they seem very "flaky" near a phone - always keep in a separate pocket
@@Teverellbest Thing? They wont replace it
With any new video from Geoff you know a lot of what to expect, but it's always a welcome surprise whenever Roger shows up. So extra thanks for this one - both of you!
I wonder if his paper travelcard went broken because of Roger reading the price of it too many times.. Anyway, that standing joke was hilarious!
The tips here are to end the mainline return earlier. Guildford to Clapham Junction (zone 2) return where many trains stop is £20, Guildford to Surbiton (zone 6) return is £15.70. With these options it can be even cheaper than a travelcard using the capping, if you have the time to get the slower mainline train, or can be smart about your journey.
If I'm understanding you, the issue here is you'd need to get off the train to 'tap-in/out' on oyster. Even though many larger stations have oyster readers on the platform, I can see this being incredibly impractical as dozens of people try to alight then reboard the same train to validate their oysters. This is going to cause delays and possibly be dangerous.
Not really. Surbiton is a big enough station, there will not be hordes of people doing it, and the number of trains going from Surbiton to Waterloo means you will be unlikely to wait any more than ten minutes for the next train. And Surbiton Station is quite a nice building to admire for a few minutes in the interim.
The super off peak return + travel card with a rail card was a life saver when I was a student in Guildford. Would have changed my entire experience of uni now it's going.
@Geoff Marshall the Travelcard will be missed. I like the convenience and cost savings with my Network railcard especially at weekends.
I agree. I won't be renewing my railcard next year as I use it to save money on a travelcard.
@@niallmgray You can add the railcard to an Oyster and get a third off the off-peak daily cap.
@@peterd788 You cannot add a Network Railcard discount to an oystercard
I just don't understand why the Oyster card can't be used anywhere where the travelcards were valid. There really should be just one card for anything.
Something that offers value and saving and convenience to the customer?
Better get rid of it!
Something that costs the transport provider revenue with massive savings dictated by central government - better get rid of it. It’s not the the gov dictated this ticket go, it’s that these are the tickets that lose TfL the most so the economics have had to kick in.
@@allanfstone
Y
A
W
N
@@WeWillAlwaysHaveVALIS Truth is inconvenient, I get that.
@@allanfstone Nope its all on the Mayor. He could have increased the price rather than abolished it, or raised revenue from elsewhere.
@@nick1635 Nope not sure he could. Not without the DfT agreeing, since the increase was on tickets sold by the rail companies and not by TfL. Price and revenue share are all government decisions these days so that option didn’t exist.
In the second point, raising revenue elsewhere doesn’t cut any costs so doesn’t address the government request (and does nothing about the travel card losses).
I no longer live in Kent but the one-day travelcard is pretty much exclusively what I used to get into and around London for research trips and the like. I hope they don't withdraw it, although with the cost of everything else going up, I'm not surprised that's in the cards, so to speak.
It’s an even better bargain travelling from Crewe if you’re prepared to use the slower LNWR service rather than Avanti. I made this journey yesterday and the cost (with a senior railcard) was £34.95 with a travel card included. The return without the travel card is £33.10. Thus a bargain £1.85 to ride around London all day, which I did!
Mind if I ask how far that is out from London?
@@toringepedersen9614 170 miles. It’s not a huge town but it is a major rail junction / interchange.
If it didn't cost you anything, then you're the product. I read too many comments. Did you spend any money on anything else in London? London is saying cha-ching sucker. Or you spent nothing, and saw a million cool things that you can't have or do. That's two quid of all day torture.
Best of luck with this video. I hope it launches you to next level on YT
Long time subscriber here. :D
That is an absolute disgrace 😤
Geoff can you make another video showing the cost increases for those who currently use 'Two Together' or 'Family & Friends' railcards? These cannot be tied to Oyster so the cost increase are beyond maddening. Even trying to factor in discount Oyster for 18's or under (at a ludicrous cost per card) it's nothing but punishment for non-Londoners.
Regardless of whether it's cheaper or not in your example. My example is ALWAYS cheaper with a travelcard. I have the option of buying a travelcard for £33.10 or an off peak day return for £33.50. So they'll actually be taking away the cost effective option for me.
I appreciate you spending money to make a good video for us. Keep up the amazing footage 🎉
I used to use travelcards all the time, especially when I was a teenager and my group of friends really liked the flexibility of just going wherever on a whim (although it was ALWAYS going to Camden because we were a group of goths and adjacent creatures), but it's been a long time since I've used it now! I suppose Oyster/contactless just made a mix of journeys so seamless that it wasn't really relevant for me anymore. Sad to see the travelcard go though.
Interesting video - it's actually not as bad as I expected since I tend to stay in zone 1. Still not happy about it, though. Worth noting that if you're not going far, the "London Terminals" ticket to Waterloo could also take to you Victoria from Clapham Junction, or Charing Cross or London Bridge from Waterloo East. The automatic gates sometimes reject the tickets, but the staff will let you through.
In fact, from Basingstoke, an "Any permitted route" ticket to London Terminals, just a few pence extra, covers Paddington via Reading as well .
2:22 Roger clearly explains the Government, led by the Tories, told TfL and the Mayor that a condition of the final bailout payment was to find between 1/2 billion to a 1 billion in savings in cost by the end of 2023.
Which is fair enough, londoners should pay for the cost of their transport
Maybe if they stopped painting rainbow flags all over the place it might save them a bit of dough 😂
utterly insignificant@@sigmaputin6888
I think the revenue share of these travelcards from remote stations were Londoners subsidising the cost of a visitor’s transport. That was the problem that needed to be solved to keep them available.
@@randommusic4567 That’s not how public transport works in most cities. Government funding usually plays a much bigger part. But of course you guys can’t do anything but hiss and seethe when you so much as read the word London.
There’s nothing fair about it anyway, it was a political move from central government simply because their party doesn’t control the mayoralty.
I was afraid the travelcards would eventually bite the dust in favour of plastic. As a rail enthusiast I mostly use a travelcard to get to/onto mainline stations for photography etc, but except on travelcards that would incur financial penalties for being over the maximum permissible times for each journey made 🤬
Whaaaaat! I've been using the one day travelcard since the days it cost about seven pounds. I feel sad.
I used this card so often when visiting London. Fixed price for a day and you didn't have to care about which mode of transport you use. The host family I visited back in 2019 actually used it to go to London at a Saturday and getting around the city the same day, too. It will cut off many people from doing those trips.
We used to get these all the time when I was at uni in Guildford. Then it cost £5!!
My local transportation has "blip your debit card" where you either pay for one trip (valid for an hour), but if you do it again within 24 hours, you get a 24 hours ticket.
The disadvantage to purchasing a ticket through their app is that you always pay SEK 30 (rush hour rate, 60 for 24 hours) instead of SEK 26 (52 for a 24 hour ticket).
But I think this is manageable for tourists, it is not a huge amount of money lost. (Enough for me to keep using their app though.)
But this is just for one city zone. Comparing it with London would probably include the whole traffic area (three cities with a city area each plus zones outside based on distance between the stops you pass). And then it is a different can of worms.
This is just upsetting stuff really, While it will not affect Londoners at all. It WILL affect those of us living in the home counties just outside of the zones where if we are doing big things like several museum trips in a day, it will just be more expensive. Coming from someone like me living in Hertfordshire with a 16-25 railcard added onto my zones 1-6 ticket only cost £14 on weekdays and £10 at weekends. and oyster? well as a railcard I can easily applied online, adding my railcard to my oyster card is a complete hassle and I have to go into London to do it. Not to mention how its £9 just to get into a terminus one way as both my locals are in the "special fare zone".
For a trainspotter, I shouldn't have a say in this because we were not the target for it, but it makes trainspotting and riding trains a lot more difficult. Heck, when there was the "have your say" before the decision, I mentioned trainspotters in a small sentence. But I mentioned heavily why this disadvantages everyone else and makes London less accessible as well as other cities like Manchester, Tyne & Wear Area and even Paris encourage the use of day unlimited travel tickets. Even their published results showed 90% of people responded that it was a terrible decision.
But you apply your oyster discount once, and the cap reduces by a third in the same day so it doesn't really matter? I think we are from the same area and it's definitely worthwhile getting the oyster Railcard discount! It's generally cheaper than a personal paper travel card from those stations
The off peak cap for a 16-25 Railcard oyster from those stations is £14.30 but you always have the potential to pay less
@@JoshLStuff The one issue me and some others are having issues with, even with oysters and PAYGO if we are train spotting we can easily get charged the maximum fare for going outside of the time limit or being on a odd route. I had it recently where for 2 jounyners Moorgate-Kingscross-Paddington-Moorgate. As I was with some people and also looking at some of the trains. I got charged a No tap out Moorgate-Paddington and a no tap in exit at Moorgate which cost me over 10 quid. TFL took ages to short it out and only recently was able to issue a refund for it. I find when transporting it is much easier to use a paper travel card as we don't get hit by the odd journey stuff. (Oh also I was only able to catch this as I had a Oyster card, anyone coming in and using contactless would likely not notice that unless they see it in their bankstatment some time after the issue.
@@D-049 That I can understand 100%. the oyster card discount is still worthwhile if the one day cards really do go away though, as at least some kind of reconciliation
It does affect Londoners too. I often take myself on a day trip to outer London, and an off-peak zone 1-6 Travelcard is £15.20 but with my Network Railcard discount it becomes £10. For my most recent day trip, the equivalent day return prices are £16.90 and £11.15. So even on just a return journey losing Travelcards is both a price increase for the traveller and I assume a reduction in the money going to TfL as now it's going to a TOC. On that occasion a return would have been fine for my plans, but had I planned stuff that had more journeys, as you can't put a Network Railcard discount on an Oyster card then it would have cost the £14.90 daily cap rather than the £10 Travelcard - so nearly a 50% price increase.
Main point I took from this video:
British train prices make even less sense than I previously thought (and I already knew they made no sense)
I really think this is a bad idea. People may find it harder to have several tickets, not everyone likes using a contactless card. Not everyone has an Oyster card, especially you live out of London. I have a railcard which also gives me a third off a travel card after 09:30
Thanks for making this video. 🎉 Incredibly informative
Really sad, no real alternative when you live out of town and like spending the full day on the rails!
TfL pay a commission to the train companies for selling a travelcard on their behalf as well. Them removing it from sale means they get all of the money from oyster and card payments (minus bank fees). So they get more than just the extra user incurred cost of the travel. No commission to pay either.