Somehow overlooked in the annual fuss about TfL fare rises was how the cost of your next aerial Thames crossing will be affected.
Cost of a single cablecar journey
2012
2013
2014
2015
Cash
£4.20
£4.20
£4.40
£4.50
Oyster
£3.20
£3.20
£3.30
£3.40
Regular user
£1.60
£1.60
£1.60
£1.70
Discovery Experience
-
-
-
£10.70
The 10p increase for cash and Oyster journeys is very much in line with the 2.5% average fare rise overall. But be warned that if you turn up with only a bank card you'll have to pay the full £4.50 because contactless isn't yet accepted on the cablecar. Meanwhile that rare breed the 'regular user' faces a 6.3% increase, but that's after a big zero last year, and maintains the saver price at half of the Oyster fare. So, no surprises.
2) Rebranding
But what's this brand new 'Discovery Experience' which has appeared in the fare tables for the first time. Whatever it is it costs £10.70, and it's so new it doesn't officially have a price increase. A footnote explains.
The Discovery Experience Package includes a non-stop return fare with in-flight discovery film, souvenir in-flight guide and entrance to Emirates Aviation Experience.
I thought this sounded very familiar, so I checked the current website, and yes it already exists (for £10).
The Full Experience Package includes a non-stop round-trip, free entrance to Emirates Aviation Experience and a souvenir in-flight guide.
Which is exactly the same customer offer now as you'll get in January, but rebranded with a different title so that TfL can pretend there isn't a 70p price rise. Naughty.
3) Upselling
Recently this monstrosity has appeared in the entrance hall at North Greenwich station, immediately in front of the top of the escalator. You can't possibly miss it.
A spare gondola hangs from the ceiling, airline branded, beneath which is a big advert for the cablecar, "just a short walk from here". Beneath that is a list of fares (which, given all the possible combinations of single, return, Oyster, Experience and riverboat, is remarkably complicated). And below that, behind the counter of a semi-permanent red booth, is a member of staff waiting patiently to sell you a ticket. Mid-evening midweek she'll be standing around like a spare part because nobody's interested. But come at the weekend and you'll encounter a surprisingly large cluster of visitors keen to participate, chattering away because they can't read the fare list (and they wouldn't understand it anyway), proffering their credit cards in exchange for a journey pass.
It's TfL's station and they can do what they like, but this all-out grab for the tourist dollar is an uncharacteristically commercial gesture.
4) In-flight movie
Last time you travelled on the cablecar you may remember it being a quiet experience. No more. A 'feature tour' has been installed, playing on the video screen throughout your flight and blaring out from an Emirates-branded panel in the roof. Various experts (very few of whom are female) then pop up and tell you about the attractions and heritage to be found in the surrounding area, with two completely different films playing north and south. It's very professionally done, but also bloody annoying when all you really want to do is look out of the window. Top tip - tell the operator immediately before you board and they can turn it off, otherwise you're stuck with this ill-judged intrusion for eight and a half minutes.
5) Touristification
Fly into the North Greenwich terminal, descend to ground level and you'll stumble across the latest added cablecar extra - a themed photo booth. A spare cabin has been set up immediately before the ticket barrier, in one direction only, allowing you to pop in and grab yourself a souvenir photograph. Simply touch the screen to start, wriggle into place in front of the branded backdrop and you can 'collect' your souvenir photo as you exit. They very much hope you'll share it - it's not free for nothing, you know.
Also prominently positioned on the way out is a large new-ish electronic display allowing you to interact with the geographical extent of Emirates' global network, which most visitors stop and press. And then of course there's the Emirates Aviation Experience, which is a single room full of marketing material masquerading as infotainment. Northbound passengers get rather less in the way of distractions, only a rather sorry looking machine offering to dispense a souvenir Emirates coin. But next time someone tries to tell you that sponsoring the tube wouldn't be that bad, remember how tacky the cablecar is, and resist.
6) Passenger numbers
What with all this relentless focus on marketing, it won't surprise you to hear that passenger numbers on the cablecar are up, depending that is on how and when you count. Half term week had almost double the number of riders as the same time last year, and the remaining weeks of October showed an 8% rise on 2013. The first week of November, however, showed almost no change, and August saw a definite fall.
Whatever, all the evidence continues to suggest that people are riding TfL's public-funded cablecar for the view and not, as was originallyintended, as a way of getting from A to B. There again, if you come after dark you can pretty much guarantee floating alone above the Thames and enjoying the twinkling lights of East London, and that beats arriving on the other side any day.
Before we dip into the world of the Oyster cap, let's check the basics. This year's average price rise is 2.5%, which TfL are describing as "frozen in real terms", but which you might still describe as "higher than my annual pay rise." Nevertheless it's lower that last year's 3.1%, and much lower than the 7% increase imposed two years previously.
Here are some of 2015'sfares in historical perspective, with Ken's years in red and Boris's in blue.
Cost of a single central London tube journey
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Oyster
£1.70
£1.50
£1.50
£1.50
£1.60
£1.80
£1.90
£2.00
£2.10
£2.20
£2.30
Cash
£2.00
£3.00
£4.00
£4.00
£4.00
£4.00
£4.00
£4.30
£4.50
£4.70
£4.80
The Zone 1 Oyster tube fare rises 4.5% in January to a new high of £2.30. Pessimists will note that this is 53% higher than when Boris came to power. Optimists, however, should note that it's still only 35% higher than a decade ago. Meanwhile anyone paying by cash continues to be screwed, as TfL try ever harder to persuade people to switch to plastic.
Cost of a tube journey from Green Park to Heathrow
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Oyster (peak)
£3.50
£3.80
£4.20
£4.50
£4.80
£5.00
£5.00
£5.10
Oyster (off-peak)
£2.00
£2.20
£2.40
£2.70
£2.90
£3.00
£3.00
£3.10
Cash
£4.00
£4.00
£4.50
£5.00
£5.30
£5.50
£5.70
£6.00
All Oyster fares for London tube journeys outside Zone 1 are rising by 10p, which is a smaller percentage increase the further out you go. But paper ticket buyers heading to Heathrow get to stump up 30p more, indeed a Zone 1-6 ticket faces a bigger increase than any other cash single fare.
Meanwhile on the buses...
Cost of a single central London bus journey
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Oyster
80p
80p
£1
90p
£1
£1.20
£1.30
£1.35
£1.40
£1.45
£1.50
Cash
£1.20
£1.50
£2
£2
£2
£2
£2.20
£2.30
£2.40
£2.40
x
The pay-as-you-go bus fare rises by 3.4% in January, that's up 5p to £1.50. Over the last ten years it's roughly doubled, and as you'll see has increased every year since Boris came to power. Meanwhile the cash fare has of course vanished, leaving a few non-Oyster stragglers unable to travel - a problem which a brand new ticket aims to address.
The One Day Bus & Tram Pass will be a disposable Oyster card with £5 face value, usable for one day's travel only. It's not yet clear how it'll work, whether the clock starts ticking when you buy it or the first time you use it - I'd assume the latter. You'll then be able to travel on as many buses as you like up to 4.30am, so best not start using one at midnight or you'll be chucking money away. Indeed anyone who makes only one (or two) bus journeys on their One Day Pass will be doing precisely that, paying the equivalent of £5 (or £2.50) per ride, which is rather more than the £1.50 that an Oyster user would pay.
Cost of One Day Travelcard
Z1-2
anytime
Z1-4
anytime
Z1-6
anytime
Z1-6
offpeak
cost now
£9.00
£11.40
£17.00
£8.90
to be retained?
×
✔
✔
✔
cost in 2015
£12.00
£12.00
£17.00
£12.00
Meanwhile next year's fare announcement includes yet another nail in the coffin of the paper Travelcard. There used to be six of these (Z1-2, Z1-3, Z1-4, Z1-5, Z1-6 and Z2-6), but from January only the Z1-4 and Z1-6 options will remain, and at inflated prices. The latest to vanish is the Z1-2 travelcard, whose current users will need a Z1-4 instead - a fare increase of 33%. TfL don't care, they'd like to see visitors to the capital using Oyster rather than queuing in large numbers at ticket offices for a one-off rectangle of cardboard, and this expensive nudge might just do it.
Which brings us finally to the whopping decrease in this year's fare announcement - that of the daily Oyster price cap. They're impressive figures.
Oyster 'pay as you go' cap
Z1-2
Z1-3
Z1-4
Z1-5
Z1-6
Z1-9
cap now
£8.40
£10.60
£10.60
£15.80
£15.80
£19.60
cap in 2015
£6.40
£7.50
£9.20
£10.90
£11.70
£20.00
% change
-24%
-29%
-13%
-31%
-26%
+2%
And this is where the claims of massive savings for part-time workers have arisen. Anyone who doesn't travel enough days to make a weekly travelcard worthwhile can instead benefit from a much reduced daily cap, adjusted to equal one fifth of the weekly travelcard fare. The potential savings are vast, as much as £661 annually for a three day a week Z1-5 traveller. But don't think this is going to benefit every part-time worker, because it's not a saving for all - the cap only affects those who make several journeys a day.
Let's use the example of someone living in Edgware (Z5) who commutes to central London (Z1) in peak hours each day. The price of a single Z1-5 tube journey is currently £4.70, and to come home again the same, making a daily total of £9.40, which is well below the existing Oyster cap of £15.80. From January the cap tumbles to £10.90, but that's still above the return tube fare of £4.80×2 = £9.60, so no saving is made. Indeed nobody making one return tube journey a day will save a penny from this new arrangement, no matter how many days a week they travel.
Things are very different with an additional journey thrown in. Suppose our Edgware resident travels to the station every morning by bus, and home again the same way, adding an extra £1.45×2 = £2.90 to their daily fare. That makes a total of £12.30, still well below the cap at present, but not so in 2015. Next year the bus plus tube combination increases to £12.60, but this is now below the reduced £10.90 cap, leading to a daily saving of £1.70. For our part time worker this adds up to an annual £230 saving, nowhere near as good as the best case £661 scenario, but very welcome all the same.
And there are of course losers, because somebody has to fund all these price cap reductions. In this case the burden falls on Outer Londoners who travel a lot during the day or at weekends, because the offpeak Oyster cap is being scrapped.
Oyster 'pay as you go' cap (off-peak)
Z1-2
Z1-3
Z1-4
Z1-5
Z1-6
Z1-9
cap now
£7.00
£7.70
£7.70
£8.50
£8.50
£11.60
cap in 2015
£6.40
£7.50
£9.20
£10.90
£11.70
£20.00
% change
-9%
-3%
+19%
+28%
+38%
+72%
Those who travel only within zones 1 to 3 will see a reduction in the cap, paying no more after the third tube journey or fifth bus ride. But those further out will have to make more journeys before the cap kicks in, in Zone 6 the equivalent of three extra journeys. If you're used to whizzing around the outer reaches of the capital at weekends, or making lots of short journeys in the middle of the day, you might well be one of those paying a lot more.
And one last thing. Look at the final column of the table, for those using Oyster services in zones 7, 8 and 9 outside the Greater London boundary. They're not getting an Oyster cap reduction at all, they're getting a massive offpeak hike of 72%, so bad luck them. But that's the price you pay for not living in London - the Mayor can do what he likes with your fares, even though you don't directly elect him.
Fly into the North Greenwich terminal, descend to ground level and you'll stumble across the latest added cablecar extra - a themed photo booth. A spare cabin has been set up immediately before the ticket barrier, in one direction only, allowing you to pop in and grab yourself a souvenir photograph. Simply touch the screen to start, wriggle into place in front of the branded backdrop and you can 'collect' your souvenir photo as you exit. They very much hope you'll share it - it's not free for nothing, you know.
