To have not reasoned how expensive travel within London is!

[Flippingflamingo]

Niece started uni in London a few weeks ago and I offered to pay to keep her Oyster card topped up as my contribution.

However I have just discovered she has spent £27 on it from Monday to Thursday this week!!

I really want to be able to pay it for her, but it’s not sustainable for me to keep topping it up constantly.

I didn’t realise it was this much and thought there were daily caps on travel!

Ooo that’s interesting, I thought that only applied to overground routes but I will get her to ask. She has the young person rail card although usually uses a bus to travel home as it’s significantly cheaper.

As a student I often couldn't afford public transport. I walked any distance up to about two miles. It was good for my health as well as my pocket! London in the centre is often pretty walkable (everything stretches out after Z3). At the moment she has no incentive to walk or find cheaper transport solutions like the £5.25 bus cap someone mentioned. Giving her a set amount for transport might help.

Nothing is cheap in London, including transport.🤷‍♀️

I got this monthly pass when I was recently a mature student.

however its not always worth buying. it was term 1 when i had a class every day. but then week 6 was reading week so no travel. then later xmas. so 2 monthly passes across first term.
then 2nd term my lectures were bunched across 3 days. so a monthly pass wasn't worth it unless i did extra travel on top (which i didn't as a mature student who had lived in london for years)

then covid!

so monthly passes may not make sense depending on how lectures fall (and i could also travel off peak anyway as lectures started at 11, so cheaper anyway)

tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel/national-railcard-discount

Not true. Plenty of things are cheap (or free) in London. Public transport is a lot cheaper than in other parts of the UK; the daily cap for Zones 1 to 3 is about £10.

By contrast, I regularly visit friends in a village about 45 minutes' bus ride from another UK city and ONE return fare is about £9.

You can put both on the same card: get an 18+ student oyster card and attach a 16-24 railcard to it. But that depends on being able to get an 18+ student oyster, which is currently impossible.

@Boomer55 transport in London is considerably cheaper than other parts of the country if you look at the distances you can travel and the many choices of type of transport (buses/trains/trams/tube etc) available.

@MarkWithaC if you are literally travelling there and back from one city to another (so 2 bus journeys) does your bus not have the £2 fare at the moment?
So 4 quid total?

I’d definitely look at just doing a monthly contribution. I don’t know where she is but because there is so much transport it can be easy to be a bit lazy and jump on tubes and buses when perhaps you don’t need to (could walk). I am pay as you go so am always making a calculation of how much the journey will be, but if someone else was paying I might not be so careful.

Why isn’t she getting a student discount Oyster card and buying a weekly travel pass?

Yes it's expensive, but there are alternatives:

Bike
e-bike
Classic car, cheap and ULEZ free. Driving in London is actually pretty easy (because nobody does it)

It's the tube too, but only off peak, it sounds like she'd save a lot. And of course if she's doing day trips having the Railcard will help.
You need a physical oyster card to get the Railcard discount, which costs £7 if you don't have one, and she'd need to remember to use that for all journeys because the weekly caps apply per payment type.

No, it's from a city to a village and not a route/bus company that is part of the scheme.

Because it's impossible?

If it continues I may suggest instead of the Oyster card I just transfer her say £100 a month to her bank. Then she can choose whether to use it on travel, or if she finds more economical ways of getting about she has more beer money

I think it's a much nicer gesture to top up her Oyster card directly so she always has a means of transport, which is essential in London. Other than walking, TfL is pretty economical and, more importantly, relatively safe.

£8 a day is not a lot but can she actually walk any of this instead?

She could get used to cycling quite quickly. I didn't cycle as a kid but learnt in my mid twenties and was cycling in busy city traffic within days. Long term it'll be worthwhile for her to put in the effort if she's only just starting Uni in London now.

I think travel in London is cheap. Cheaper than public transport where I live.
How much were you thinking it would cost?

@MarkWithaC oh that's a bit of a bummer for you 🙁

It's mad isn't it! We're a half hour drive from Liverpool and a 1 hour drive from Manchester, but getting the train to either will set us back ~£15 for an adult off peak. For 4 of us, that's almost £50 just to get in, whereas we can drive, pay £4 to cover the Mersey bridge if we go to Liverpool, and park for less than a tenner. Plus, the convenience of being able to leave when we want and not worry about getting a seat or forgetting a bag. It's no wonder we're in the middle of a climate emergency when public transport is so unappealing.

Has someone seriously suggested buying a classic car as an alternative??!

Agree with a pp that getting the discount via student Railcard would be helpful, also that if she's getting a monthly pass she needs to think it through in advance and decide which day to start it on. In December/January for eg presumably she won't be at college so much so it may not be worth it.

Public transport is expensive everywhere. London is actually better value than most of the rest of the UK in that provision is at least frequent and comprehensive. If I got the bus to work here I'd be paying £8 a day and it would take bloody ages even though it's only four miles away - two buses each way, infrequent service, lots of hanging around at stops. I wouldn't be able to use the bus to go out in the evening because there aren't any.

I know. I'm a big advocate for not driving and using public transport instead, but the infrastructure really needs to be there and it needs to be affordable, otherwise you can't blame people for driving.

Yeah, luck of the draw I suppose!

Exactly- it's doable to live car-free within the Greater London area, even on the London edges of the home counties, but it's completely impossible to do it outside of the big cities up North. Even when one of us does get the train somewhere, we need to drive to the nearest station in a different village.