| That sums up the complexity better than I ever could, but as a tourist visiting London it was relatively painless to tap my Apple Watch and pay by contactless credit card when I got on and when I got off, as long as you’re travelling through supported stops within the city region. This generally included any routes to and from London airports. Comparing the process in London to that of, say, Paris, it is night and day better with London’s system. Yes, trips might cost more than a flat rate, but you don’t need to have a special card - contactless payments are charged at the same rates as an Oyster card would get charged, including discounts if you take multiple trips in a day. Compare to Paris where it’s a flat rate, but you can’t get a normal ticket because your anonymous card is somehow designed only for tourist pricing. Let’s not even bother with how long the lines can be to buy said card. I’ll take a system where you tap on and tap off any day of the week over a flat rate system that doesn’t support easy contactless payment at the same rates as everybody else. I should clarify though - this only applies to any travel by train that you can do from stations that have contactless to stations that also have contactless. Anywhere else, you’re expected to tap off and pay a normal fare for the rest of your travel to an unsupported station by buying it from a website. And while it is unusual to have such complexity, I should mention that rail travel between countries often has similar complexity - I bought a ticket once from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden, but got on a train operated by a different company and had to buy a second ticket - the trains left at the same time to and from the same stations but from two different operators. The confusing part is that the train ticket I needed to buy wasn’t available from a Denmark regional train travel ticket kiosk, it was timed ticket you had to buy in advance from a website as the train’s origins was in Sweden rather than Denmark. (And the Denmark station didn’t have Swedish kiosks.) I guess what I’m saying is that trains can make airlines look efficient, at least when it comes to buying and handling tickets. ;-) Edit: I should also mention if I got any of this wrong, I’m actually from North America and about all I can say in response is “at least you have (express, high speed) trains,” as I look at our preference for highways and buses and how most rail in North America is for cargo... |
Literally.
Take bus companies. You don't say if you used any buses, but if you did they all work the same in London, they're all painted red, they take Oyster (your Apple Watch will work), the system keeps track and lets you use more than one to get to your destination without special fees. There are a bunch of bus companies in London, but there's no reason you would care about that, they're all the same to you.
Everywhere else in the UK is forbidden from doing that. In my home city for example there were four major bus companies, each painted their buses a different colour, each used separate tickets, each had its own "integrated" travel pass system. If I caught a 20 out of the city, then boarded a U6 that's two separate journeys with two separate companies, and thus two separate charges and the city government is legally prohibited from telling them to knock it off and just charge a single fee like London.