Uncle Ken, and his rotten Oysters
I finally bought an Oyster card the other day. (Actually, to be strictly accurate, you don't buy you pay a 3 quid deposit for the card, but to all intents and purposes I bought it.) I don't like the damned things in principal. In spite of assurances that the cards only store information for the purposes of determining fare charges, they are being used to track individual movements through the transport system (as admitted by the police on news media articles some months ago). This to me is yet another step down the route of instating all of the infrastructure that could all so easily be abused by a corrupt government to run a police state and suppress disention instead of the nominal democracy we still have. (Think I'm being paranoid? Think what state Zimbabwe is in. Then think how much worse it would be if since the formation of a democracy about 25 years ago the government had had the resources to slowy put in place all the surveillance we now endure as a normal part of our daily lives. There'd be no opposition whatsoever, never mind the meagre dissent that manages to struggle through at present. Now think how fast and loose our own "democratic" government has played it with the truth and how often they've tried to suppress inconvenient truths by force of civil suit or criminal law in the last few years, then tell me hand on heart you honestly think I'm just paranoid.) Still - I digress, and that's quite possibly the basis for another article, another day.
Back to where I was. I now have in my keeping an Oyster card. An RF chip embedded in a standard credit sized plastic card. Supposedly it's a convenient way to pre-pay for travel in the London area, and to never pay more than the minimum daily fare to cover your travel requirements without having to plan beforehand. You hand your money over, the card is "credited" with the equivalent fare value, and credit is deducted as you travel. You get on a bus, you pay a discounted single fare. Another bus, another discounted single fare. A third and you pay the difference between what has already been deducted and a discounted bus travel pass, because that's cheaper than three individual singles in total. All subsequent bus journeys on the same day are free. You get the picture. It's supposed to apply to travel in the whole of London. (To put it another way the transport companies get their mitts on more of your money long before you even think about setting foot on public transport often enough to need to spend it, but again I digress.)
Against my better judgement, I finally plumped for one of these horrid blue and white slivers of plastic, with convenience in mind. Figuring that today would be a day for lots of errands, I might or might not have the chance to take a trip up to the West End, but using the Oyster would be convenient because if I did, I could avoid having to commit myelf to a daily travel pass before hand, using the card, save myself some time, and allow myself the flexibility to choose on the fly. I couldn't have been more wrong. What they don't make clear is that whilst you can buy a paper Travelcard which gives free reign to use any and all trains, buses or tube trains in Greater London, Oyster only works (pre-pay) on the buses and tubes. If you want to take a trip into the centre from suburbia, you still have to buy a paper ticket to cover those journeys. What's more - if you buy a return ticket (which only provides for a single train journey in each direction, not the unlimited use of a Travelcard) the combined cost with the deductions for tube and bus use will almost certainly come to more than the cost of the Travelcard. Either that, or you fight your way on buses and tubes to make a journey which would take half as long on the train. So - yet again, Uncle Ken has impelemented a policy which benefits everyone in the central region (relying only on bus and tube), whilst those of us living in the outer reaches get pissed on from a great height, and still have to pay for the privelege. It makes me sick. Almost as sick as rotten shell-fish.
