My last Annual Travelcard just expired, and I shall miss it.
I bought my first Annual Travelcard in 2001 when I moved to London. This is the easiest and cheapest way to commute without faffing at ticket machines every day, I thought, and I was right. That first Annual Travelcard cost me £896, i.e. the equivalent of £2.45 a day, and these days even an off-peak single journey into zone 1 costs more than that.
I decided to buy a z1-3 Travelcard even though technically I only needed z1-2. I live right on the edge of zone 2, I reasoned, and it would be stupid to have to pay extra every time I went to Stratford. I've stuck with a z1-3 Travelcard ever since because it gave me free rein around virtually all of inner London, and any excursions to the suburbs were cheap occasional add-ons.
My Annual Travelcard was a significant investment, paying a lump sum up front for travel I hadn't yet made. Not everyone can afford to do this, indeed it's another example of long-term savings made by well-off people while less flush folk pay more often and end up paying more overall.
I checked how much I've spent on Annual Travelcards since 2001 and it's a lot of money.
Cost of my annual z1-3 Travelcard
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
£896
£912
£924
£952
£1000
£1040
£1096
£1136
£1208
£1208
£1288
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2022
2023
2024
£1368
£1424
£1472
£1508
£1520
£1548
£1600
£1648
£1740
£1808
£1916
It really is a lot of money, it's £29,000. But for that I've been able to swan around London for the best part of quarter of a century so it's been well worth it.
I know it's been well worth it because I checked. When I was commuting five days a week all I had to do was make a couple of extra journeys in the evening or at the weekend and it had paid for itself. More recently I've not been commuting daily so I could have been losing money hand over fist, but I used a spreadsheet one year to see how much PAYG would have cost and my Annual Travelcard was still better value. However this is only because I am a serial user of London transport and travel all over the place on a ridiculously regular basis. Your average non-gadabout would indeed be out of pocket.
My Annual Travelcard has allowed me one-price travel across zones 1-3, which is effectively what a daily cap does. But a daily z1-3 cap costs £10 and I was paying a lot lot less than that to do exactly the same, indeed about half the price. This is why using PAYG gives me the heebeegeebees.
My last Annual Travelcard cost me £1916 which works out as £5.50 a day. That's a big sunk cost, so for example any day I stayed at home or spent in Norfolk was essentially £5.50 down the drain. But on most days that £5.50 was an utter bargain, merely the same as a return trip from zone 1 into zone 2, so every journey I made on top of that was effectively free.
My Annual Travelcard marked me out as one of a dwindling number of year-long ticket holders. According to a recent FoI request the number of Annual Travelcards issued in the last financial year was just 15,192, a pitiful total in a capital of nine million people, and down a massive 80% since 2018/19. Most Londoners have deduced that PAYG better suits their needs, especially anyone who sometimes works from home, so expect Annual Travelcard sales number to dwindle even further very soon.
My Annual Travelcard allowed me to pay last year's fares for this year's travel. This was brilliant, especially in any year after a significant fare rise. I really made the most of this by buying my last Annual Travelcard at the end of February just before fares rose at the start of March. That meant the Travelcard I was still using last week cost £1916 whereas a new one would have cost £2008, and today that price jumps again to £2100. PAYG users, by contrast, get shafted straight away.
Annual Travelcards give a saving of 13% compared with continuing use of Monthly Travelcards, i.e. you get 12 months travel for the price of 10½. Alternatively they give a 23% saving compared with continuing use of 7 Day Travelcards, meaning you get 52 weeks for the price of 40. That's a lot of extra free weeks, although if you have a full time job and take six weeks annual leave plus bank holidays and the occasional sickie it might not actually add up to a saving.
My Annual Travelcard came with a Gold Card for additional discount on National Rail fares. It was like having a Network Railcard but without paying for it, i.e. I got a third off all off-peak fares across southeast England. Even better a Network card only allowed cheaper fares after 10am whereas in 2015 Gold Cards became valid from 9.30am and I caught loads of earlier trains to Norfolk thanks to that.
My Gold Card, once applied to my Oyster, let me pay less on journeys in zones 4-6 too. All I had to pay was the extension fare from the edge of zone 3, and then I got one third off that off-peak too. Bow to West Drayton is normally £3.60, for example, but I only needed to pay the extra £1.90 from Hanwell and then they deducted 33% so the actual fare was only £1.25. Nobody on PAYG goes anywhere for as little as that.
My Annual Travelcard also allowed me to catch buses for free - that's all the TfL buses everywhere including the severely peripheral ones. It was technically possible for me to get to Dorking and back by bus for nothing, indeed I tried it once, and that's several miles outside London... as were Redhill, Bluewater, Watford and Slough.
The joy of buses being free is that I never needed to get the train to a zone 4 station and pay extra, I could get off at the edge of zone 3 and get the bus. I got seriously well practised at this eventually, using stations like Hendon, Leytonstone, Crystal Palace and Wimbledon as a jumping off point. With a bit of patience I could catch free buses even further, all the way to Uxbridge and Upminster if necessary, and because I have lots of free time that's generally what I did.
My Annual Travelcard also allowed me to catch trams for free, a perk you get with any Travelcard with z3, 4, 5 or 6 validity. That made a lot of south London readily accessible, or at least not quite as inaccessible it would have been, bringing even Coulsdon and Biggin Hill into practical reach. Indeed I've made so much use of buses and trams over the last year that I only gave TfL £12 on top of my initial £1916 outlay, that's how exceptional value my Annual Travelcard has been.
My Annual Travelcard encouraged short journeys in a way PAYG never does. I could hop on a train for one stop or a bus for two stops without affecting my daily fare, which was especially useful if I was trying to make a connection in a hurry. PAYG is particularly brutal if you keep switching between trains and buses, never quite getting the full benefit of either, whereas a Travelcard enables efficient multi-modal journeys and indeed allows you to take the lazy option without penalty.
Essentially my Annual Travelcard allowed me to swan around London to my heart's content without worrying about how much it'd cost. This is not to be underestimated. Sure it was a huge price up front but after that I knew where I could go and how much it'd cost me, i.e. nothing extra, and that really encouraged me to travel and travel like a mad thing.
My Annual Travelcard also allowed me to pass in and out of ticket barriers to my heart's content without worrying if I was going to be slapped with an enormous penalty fare. I cannot begin to tell those of you with PAYG how good that feels. I wasn't forever thinking "should I have tapped out there?" or "oh god I hope I tapped in" or "have I been down here too long?" or "is it off-peak yet?" or "will they bankrupt me if I enter the station for 60 seconds and then tap back out again?". I didn't need to know the minutiae of all the stupid penalising rules because with an Annual Travelcard there weren't any.
And my Annual Travelcard allowed me to travel at any time of the day, be it the height of the rush hour or the middle of the night. Peak times meant nothing to me so long as I stayed in zones 1-3, and peak travel was even better value. I shall miss that freedom.
My last Annual Travelcard just expired and I already miss it. I'm struggling to get used to paying for travel and indeed paying what feels over the odds, so have been travelling a lot less as a result. I really struggled with my last evening out at BestMate's, a two-stop journey to Plaistow and back, which suddenly cost me £3.60 rather than the zero I've been paying since 2001. Worse still today is fare rise day so when I go back this week it'll be £4, and no way is eight minutes on the District line worth that.
I've taken my final Gold Card out of my Oyster wallet where one's been a fixture for over twenty years. I've also removed the photocard because I won't need that again, and doing that made me really sad. The photo is of me in September 2001 when I was a chipper 36 year-old with a big grin, flawless skin, unfaded hair and thousands of London adventures ahead of me. Amazingly that frozen snapshot has been acceptable to ticket inspectors for 24 decaying years, but I now have to retire that idealised angel and face up to being a near-pensioner instead.
The reason I've bought my last Annual Travelcard is that I'm about to switch over to a 60+ Oyster instead, the Mayoral treat that gifts free travel to sexagenarians to the annoyance of everyone younger. It hasn't arrived yet, indeed expect to read a post about how blindingly incompetent the onboarding process is at a later date. But when it does I'll suddenly be able to go everywhere in zones 1-6 for free which'll be game-changingly better, but also nowhere before 9am which'll be annoyingly worse.
My last Annual Travelcard just expired, and I shall miss it.
