please empty your brain below
It's surprisingly complicated.
It's made worse because while outer zone tube fares may be cheap, on the trains they are much more. Eg Kingston - Wimbledon is £1.50 by bus but £2.40 by train off peak. £3.40 peak.
Buy a day return from Sevenoaks to London and the weekday 0850 to London is a peak train. Buy a day return from Sevenoaks to Swindon and the same 0850 is off peak.
How the ticket inspectors can be expected to remember all this is a mystery !
But if you really want to see just how complicated rail travel can be, explore the weird and wonderful world of Positive and Negative Easements in the ATOC Routeing Guide...
"Buy a day return from Sevenoaks to London and the weekday 0850 to London is a peak train. Buy a day return from Sevenoaks to Swindon and the same 0850 is off peak."
So the trick is to buy an off peak day return from Sevenoaks to e.g Finsbury Park on the 0850, (which is not only cheaper than the peak hour ticket to London Bridge but includes a Z1 tube journey) and somehow change your mind about using the Kings Cross to Finsbury Park leg!
Sadly there's no off-peak fare to Finsbury Park valid the 0850. Off-peak fares at peak times seem to be available only to relatively far-flung places.
@ Pedantic of Purley
Many circuitous routes are specifically banned, e.g. Negative Easement 700549 outlaws using a Gatwick to Elephant & Castle via Not Underground ticket via Victoria.
ATOC's fare rules are far more complicated than TfL's !
Oyster caps are calculated on the fly after every journey.
Contactless caps are calculated at the end of the day and will search for the cheapest combination of caps and single journeys.
I can't remember specific examples but there are several, especially now that you have Gatwick and the other special zones. One which would have existed if railcards on contactless was available in 2009, would be Z2-6 offpeak cap which was cheaper than bus cap. If you reached Z2-6 cap first then all buses would still be free, but you'd only have paid 2.5 bus fares. If you took 3 buses first, then you would pay the bus cap. I.e. the problem is that you can't get refunded on Oyster if you qualify for a lower cap afterwards.
Depending on the time of travel, zones crossed, how many more journeys you expect to do that day, and..and..and.. you can save a fair amount of cash by buying the correct ticket.
Maybe. But consider this. You get on at Gatwick Airport. You use your Oystercard. You make a journey to Elephant & Castle by any plausible route you want so long as you don't need to intermediately tap your Oystercard. Who is going to argue that you are doing anything wrong and are trying to avoid paying the correct fare?
Even it it went to court, which I would consider very highly unlikely, I think the judge would have stern words about a fare structure that was impossible to understand and dismiss the case.
The trik of booking to just the other side of London (e.g Finsbury Park from south of the river) to take advantage of different off peak periods for cross London tickets may not work from Sevenoaks, but the fares Guru Barry Does has written in his column in RAIL that it does from further out - e.g Bounemouth.
Doubling back: I was quite surprised to find that a round trip from Zone 1 to Tottenham Hale (out from Moorgate via Highbury & Islington, back to St Pauls via Stratford) was charged as Moorgate to St Pauls - it treated my passing out through the Tube barriers at Tottenham Hale and in the NR barriers, as an "Out of Station interchange.
Curiously, if you are travelling from Brentwood to Liverpool Street, the National Rail Journey Planner actually recommends travelling in the 'wrong' direction out to Shenfield and then doubling back. The double-back journey costs less than the fare from Shenfield, whether it's a paper ticket or Oyster.
in 2006, the zone 1-2 cap (there was no specific zone 1 cap) was £5.70 peak, £4.40 off-peak; and zones 2-6 was £6.90 peak, £3.80 off-peak.
I think the fare structure's so complicated these days that it's hard to argue that they're trying to incentivise people's travel patterns by making some journeys cheaper than others.
Sorry dg, I didn't see your KLAXON comment before I posted, hence your 'Can't take a hint' edit. But I honestly can't see why my comments are considered so way off topic, and why this is so frowned upon.
You've rightly pointed out that Oyster's charges are illogical, inconsistent and very hard to understand, even for for anoraks let alone the average passenger who only wants to get from A to B without wasting money. I thought I'd merely added comments showing further examples of the incredibly complex routeing and easement rules. Even ATOC warns passengers that they're almost impossible to understand and suggests they should just rely on the verdict of the Journey Planner !
Surely this makes a positive contribution to the debate and will be of interest to your readers? Of course, it's your blog and you're entitled to make the rules. But unless people are spamming, trolling or deliberately going off to really unrelated topics, I fear that over-use of the KLAXON may have the unintended consequence of 'Not Getting Any Comments' (7d) !
Please let me know what I'm doing wrong...
If you touch in, go somewhere immediately on a tram for 20 minutes, you've still for 50 minutes left to travel on a tram somewhere else without having to touch in.
TfL don't make this widely known though, for obvious reasons.
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