I work three days a week and often ponder whether it's cheaper to get a season Travelcard or to use Oyster Pay as You Go. My fuzzy thinking is, if I only work 3 days, the PAYG is cheaper.
If I do a lot of local travel (buses to Brixton, Clapham or Streatham) over the weekend, a Travelcard might save me a bit of money, but because these are often unplanned, I might also lose money, as I would if I were absent from work for sick, unplanned annual leave, or working at home or out of town. If I go to work four days, or go into town on a day off it 'probably' makes sense to get a Travelcard.
Last night I decided to apply an accountant's rigour to my fuzzy thinking. It's actually more complicated because of my occasional but not obligatory use of Zone 1 Tube stations: details below the fold for anoraks!
I originally looked to see the value of a weekly or monthly card, before I got side-tracked by the Zone issue. I work 3 days a week or between 12 and 15 days a calendar month, not including planned and unplanned absences. So, I wanted to compare the weekly or monthly travelcard to the daily cap.
Very simply, I divided the monthly cost by the Daily Peak cap. I discovered that for Zone 1-2, a Monthly card is the equivalent of 13.3 daily caps. For Zone 1-3 it's 12.3. For Zone 2 only it's the equivalent of 10. For Zones 2-3 it's 7.9.
That astounded me! Depending on which Zones you use, a monthly travel card makes a relative saving of half as much again compared to the daily cap. One could argue the special case for Zone 1 but a 1-2 monthly is already a lot more than a 2-3 monthly.
The distortion comes from the cheap fares in the central zone compared to the suburbs. The daily cap on Zones 1-2 peak is £8; in Zones 2-3 it's £10. This can't be defended by tourism, because tourists can save by waiting til 9.30 to get public transport, no great hardship. Offpeak, Zone 1 is £6.60, 1-2 is £6.60, and Zone 2-3 is £7.30. So, season travel is more expensive in town than in the 'burbs, but daily travel more so than in the 'burbs.
One can argue for ever about how many days 'free' travel a season ticket can buy you, but it ought to be consistent across the board. The disparity between 7.9 and 13.3 is huge, and this is largely because of the seemingly totally bizarre way of setting the daily cap for each of different combinations of zones.
People accept that they have to pay a large proportion of their salary on travel costs. But I think we have a right to expect fairness and consistency, and, above all , transparency. It has taken me a certain amount of concentration to analyse this, and I'm an accountant.
At least it gives me the chance to use the word 'Byzantine'!
The anoraky details about Uncertainty of Zone!
If I worked full time, the Season ticket would be a no brainer. But which one? A Zone 2 only ticket would cost me £6.80 a week less than a Zone 1-2, and the offpeak daily price cap of £6.60 would make the Zone 2 card, plus auto top-up the choice if I could be sure that I am only venturing into Zone 1 by Tube one day a week.
However, the cost of a monthly Travelcard is 3.8 times the cost of a weekly one, so assuming one is planning to work for the entire month, or maybe just take a day or so off, the monthly makes more sense. As I generally don't know what I'm doing in three weeks time, on balance, it would seem to make sense to buy a Zone 1-2 at £26.10 more than a Zone 2 only, because 4 days with Tube trips in Zone 1 would wipe out the saving. Or would they? Don't I mean 6 Tube journeys: I go from work to the Barbican and then home by Tube, activating the daily cap, but I go to Covent Garden, Coliseum and Southbank by bus, with Tube home, so I'd be hit by 1 £4 cash fare each time. Correction: the Oyster PAYG single fare is £1.90, so a Barbican trip would only cost me £3.80
That bit is complicated for me to calculate, but given all the ifs and buts, I have concluded that, because I intend to be in work constantly at least until Easter, I'm better off buying a monthly ticket: February has 12 working days, and March has 15. Do I make the up-front saving by going only for Zone 2? It's a judgement. I'm prepared to 'lose' maybe a tenner for the convenience and flexibility of being able to stray into Zone 1 when it suits. But in these times of Austerity, £26 a month would be a welcome saving to many. A weekly and monthly cap would solve that dilemma!
