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eater81 Wrote:

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> Oyster readers good, ticket barriers bad! Will

> not be impressed if I end up forced to pay for the

> pitiful service that constitutes our local rail

> transport system.


Oh no! Barriers would mean you might have to buy a ticket to use the trains. Could this be "yet another example of the big brother police state in which we live" (eater81, here)?

Can't any of you spot a joke! Of course I don't expect to travel round london for free, well actually I do, I have a bike, which is a far better way to get around than using the trains. Every time I catch a train they just make me angry. Probably something to do with being jossled by hurried commuters at the station, crammed in with a load of people who are all in a bad mood because they have to go to work and wasting valuable time pointlessly hanging around at stations waiting for trains to arrive. Dodging the occasional fare mitigates this somewhat, at least I haven't had to pay to get pissed off and it balances out financially the times when I do pay a fare which is incredidbly overpriced.

..And what exactly is a ?validator??


I thought the whole point of the oyster card idea was to use pre-pay on a London-wide basis and to include South East London in a pre-payment system that the rest of London has benefited from for some time.


When I go to cities of comparable size and scope (e.g. New York) I am struck by the integrated and relatively cheap public transport system running 24 hours a day. We pay a fortune in London for what (especially in the South) is basically a knitted together hodgepodge of nineteenth century rival railway company interests; a compromise further weakened by the lack of vision and completing interests. It seems to have defied the wit of modern transport planners to come up with a properly integrated system ? though lack of investment, poorly thought through privatisation and political cowardice are not helpful.


I may be making an assumption here, but thought that it was more or less accepted that in a city of London?s size public transport is a key ingredient of not only productivity but also quality of life. The South East ? partly because of the quirkiness of the transport map ? is a poor relation transport-wise. In East Dulwich we are only a few miles from central London but have a rail link that is essentially the northern part of an outer suburban system rather than part of a central network. That was perhaps OK historically, before the roads became functionally unusable at peak times (yes alright, fine on a bike?). Now we need something better.


Whoever thought it was a good idea to dig up the tram lines?? There are one of the best urban transit systems available - ask Toronto where the street-cars system is still expanding (OK, the taxi drivers hate waiting behind the street cars, but you can?t please everyone!) What has happened to the Peckham to Central London rapid transit scheme? A victim of the Olympic hubris??

Unfortunately we live in a nation which was one of the first to develop cities that are still standing in their present form, one of the few in Europe whose railways lines were not bombed unusable during WWs I and II and which was an early adopter of railway and Underground technology. So far, so well done us. Trouble is we are stuck with our legacies, and the cost of updating them is huge.

eater81 Wrote:

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> will dex, if you think 4 quid for a return into

> town is a bargain then you a clearly a moron.

> Probably the same kind of moron that would pay

> 500k for a shit terraced house in East Dulwich.



?500K for a family home is pretty much in line with other major capitals in America, Europe and Asia, I would have thought.


I would agree that public transport is expensive in London though, compared with most other places I've been to. But this does not make anyone a "moron".

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