[aronpye]

An annual London travel card is £2,568, and that only lets you travel around London. So why should be instead force people to buy something more expensive and less useful than a car?

[adrianN]

An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€, I believe it's about the same in Paris. An annual Vienna travel card is 365€. At least in Berlin car ownership correlates very strongly with household income. The majority of poor households don't have access to a car, whereas rich households have multiple cars.

[ratww]

> An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€

Or 480€ if you get it trough your employer, which amounts to 40€ a month.

[iso1631]

Average cost of owning a car in the UK is more than that, especially in London where there is limited land

And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.

[multjoy]

Ackshually, an annual Z1-3 travel card (other zones are available) costs the same as 40 weeks at the weekly cap (£43.50 vs £1740).

If your weekly travel sees you routinely hitting the cap then a travel card may represent better value.

[iso1631]

Very few people travel zone 1-3 enough to hit a weekly cap, even before covid, hence very few annual travelcards were sold in London.

[avianlyric]

I used to spend close to £3k a year on petrol commuting, I then need to pay insurance, MOT and road tax on top of that to run a car. All of that is ignoring the £14/day congestion charge (that’s another £3.5k/year for those in the back).

The annual london travel card is much cheaper than operating a car. Not to mention public transport is london is an order of magnitude faster than car for most intra-city journeys.