Pink London Underground Card Validator

After at the beginning of the year 2011 (as well as 2010 and 2009) the prices on London Undergroud shot up once again thanks to the policy employed by the new London major Boris Johnson. It became even more difficult to people on low income to get to Central London from Loughton. The price of the single peak hour ticket went up to £4.50; off-peak ticket now costs £2.70. So it now costs nine pounds just to get to work and back if you work in Central London, and travel to work on the tube from Loughton or Debden underground stations. If you don’t live in Loughton and have to travel to one of the stations on the car, I don’t envy you because you probably also have to pay for your car’s parking, which is very expensive as well.

If one doesn’t work in Central London but works in North London, then the best route to take would be to Stratford on Central Line and then on the newly named London Overground (former North London Line) to wherever then a person needs to go. The line goes through London’s zone 2, so one would suppose that the ticket price would be £2.50… but not everything is so easy these days because Transport for London have introduced so-called Oyster validators, which everyone travelling through London with the Oyster card has to use on certain routes to get the expected fare even though these routes are default ones and it’s bluntly obvious that to travel, people would choose them over the other longer routes. Oyster Validator is a pink card reader, which needs to be touched to tell London Underground that a person takes THIS route as opposed to THAT route.

Thus instead of trusting people and allowing them to choose the best route for the best price, Transport for London now penalises people for not knowing that they need to use the pink validator to validate their oyster cards on a particular route.

Loughton or Debden to London Overground stations in North London is a good example of this policy, which is completely unfair towards travelling public. If say I want to travel from Loughton to Hackney Central, I’d choose London Overground to get there. This is a no-brainer choice as it’s quicker and easier than any other route. And without any validation it will cost £2.50 (zones 6 to 2 travel), which is how it should be and was - immediately after Oyster Card has been introduced on North London Line. But if I want to travel to Canonbury, Highbury & Islington and other stations after Dalson Kingsland on London Overground line, you wouldn’t believe it, but it will already cost £4.50 - the cost of travelling from zone 6 to zone 1.

Extract from the tube map - travelling from Loughton to North London

Does this make sense? It doesn’t to me as I’ve chosen the best and quickest route and I don’t expect to be asked to validate it because it’s simply a common sense to use the route. Yet the validation of the Oyster card is necessary on this route if you don’t want to pay the unfair fare.
This has been one of several Transport for London fundraising tricks (introduced with the agreement of London’s majors firstly Ken Livingstone and later Boris Johnson) to suck yet more money out of the hardworking people of London and surrounding counties. And I mean ‘hardworking’ because I’m talking about those who work, not those who stays at home, receive benefits and don’t travel anywhere on public transport.

The other London Underground dirty tricks to yield as much cash as possible included:

• The peak oyster card ticket prices from Zone 1 to Zone 6 were put up by 30% during 2009-2011 - from £3.50 to £4.50.
• In 2009, the start of rush hour pricing period has been moved from 7 o’clock in the moring to 6:30am. Thousands of people have had their fares increased instantly.
• The refund for more than a 15-minute delay on London Underground is now a price of a single ticket for the route a person took. Previously, the refund was always 5 pounds, no matter where and how you got stuck on the tube.
• The congesting charge went up from 5 pounds initially when introduced in 2003 to 10 pounds in 2010 - absolutely unjustified 100% rise.