If I was staying in the area I was going to think about that. I wonder how much it is from Reading now... I have friends over soon and we were going to crash here but if train costs are too high it might just be cheaper to look for a nasty little B&B for a few days for him.

Awful isn't it? All the people on my bus this morning who didn't have travelcards were horrified at how much it had gone up.

Aye, I was somewhat shocked - my travelcard expired over the holidays and living some way from an open venue where I could renew it, I had to pay this 25% increase to get as far as somewhere I could pay for a ticket for the rest of the day. (And here was me thinking the 8-odd percent increace in rail fairs was bad ...)

We're being priced out of London for the fucking Olympics. I hate Ken Livingston and TfL

Ha, I'm in yorkshire, and hte bus yourneys here cost £1.45 off peak, you don't want to know what it goes up to at peak times. It's actually cheaper if there's three of you to take a taxi to town.........

All for improvements, and if the improvement is that we all learn to drive and destroy the public network, so be it.....

Yet more price rises for no noticeable improvement in service. They added a car to all the Jubilee line trains last week but so far they've done squat all about the constant signal failures at Finchley Central. I wouldn't mind paying somewhat over the odds for a system that actually worked, but...

The only thing I would say is that rightly or wrongly, the *entire* point of these price rises is to stop people paying cash and make them buy Oyster cards instead (the prices on Oyster have apparently gone down - so that it should now be about twice as expensive to pay cash compared with Oyster pay as you go).

Oyster is (leaving aside privacy issues) pretty easy to get into: it costs two quid to get a pay-as-you-go version, requires no documentation, takes about a minute, anyone can get one, and it will never cost you more than the equivalent daily travelcard would cost you, because daily costs are capped at that level (actually a bit less then the cash one).

i.e. If you take loads of pay-as-you-go journeys in one day, and are then thinking, "Shit! It would have been cheaper to buy a one-day travelcard!" you don't need to worry because you cost for the day will be capped at a little below the cost of a one-day travelcard.

Thus ends the commercial. :)

One of the problems is if you have an annual season ticket which is not an oyster (because SW Trains don't issue them) and you want to travel out of your zones you have to buy a cash extension ticket. Because oyster has to be touched in and out it can't be used for extensions unless you break your journey at the point at where your season ticket kicks in.

Yep, and the train prices have gone up too. That's the third time in the last 18 months. At this rate it'll be cheaper for me to buy a car and drive to basingstoke than it will be for me to take the train.

yeah, I succumbed to Oyster with much gnashing of teeth . . .