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to make us pesky visitors (not that I've been for a while) subsidise it for you.
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Other way round - my council tax subsidises the tubes and buses for you, sweet visitor. Say thank you, now.
Last time I looked Oyster is available before you travel and there was an offer on recently making it free to obtain one instead of the usual £3 deposit (now ended, it's £3 again).
I'm not sure if they're available at airports, but they should be (they'll be available at Heathrow, of course, since it has a tube station, and at Waterloo International, so that's two of the main ways in covered). You can even order a Travelcard on Oyster in advance for a particular time period, should you want to which and works on the main line trains in the correct zone, too. As usual, planning your trip properly has its rewards - don't complain if you don't do your research before travelling - you wouldn't be surprised by having to speak French to a French taxi driver or pay in euros in Rome. Anyway, for anyone fancying a trip to London, here you are:
https://sales.oystercard.com/oyster/...method=display
Bus fares - from memory they were
* 70p outside central London and a pound inside central London back around 2000,
* then a pound everywhere,
* then Oyster 80p off-peak/£1 peak,
* then Oyster £1 all day,
* now going back to 90p all day
So the maximum rise in the last 7 years is 20p (29%), and if your journey takes you into the centre it's a fall of 10p (10%). As a comparison, here are a few other areas:
* Birmingham (TWM) - £1 for short, £1.40 for long journeys
* Glasgow (First) - 75p to £1.35
* Edinburgh (Lothian) - £1 flat
I also looked at Newcastle, Manchester, Bristol and Liverpool, but there isn't an obvious place to look for fare information in those areas. Well, they've got the fragmented Thatcher-inspired deregulation, of course, which fortunately never happened in London (the services are run by private companies as concessions, where the fares and service quality are set centrally - this seems to be about the best model for public private partnership, and the new Overground rail concession is on a similar model, part run by the world-class Hong Kong metro operator MTR using brand-new air-conditioned trains, fully integrated into Oyster etc. Can't be bad).
So the 'expensive London buses' theory doesn't hold water, particularly if you travel by bus outside London and pay more for a substantially worse service (dirty, old bus, exact change only, complicated fare structure etc., in my experience in Birmingham). The ridership figures tend to bear this out, since the main factor in recent increases in UK bus ridership is London - the rest of the country went down. Finally, since average wages in London are rather higher than elsewhere, so if you don't live in London you're being screwed twice by your local bus bandits - a £1 fare here is a lot less out of your wage packet than in Glasgow, say.
I really don't get people complaining about Livingstone's transport policy - surely getting more people on public transport by improving it, making it more convenient and offering low fares is a *good* thing? Or am I missing something? Is this the standard British knocking of success, even when it's the rare example of a politician who actually delivers what he said?
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And of course Ken does love those pesky terrorists in the middle east, well, the ones that blow up Israeli women and children anyway.
I hear he's running for Mr Anti-semetic 2007.
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BS, Xacc - what evidence is there that he's anti-Semitic (note spelling)? I certainly don't think he is, and as you know I'm of Jewish origin. I'd be a lot less polite if doorstepped by an Evening Standard hack, or perhaps someone trying to convince me that Israeli women and children are somehow more deserving of life and limb than, say, Lebanese or Palestinian ones. That would really get up my nose.
Anyway, Boris is 'Very Strongly For the Iraq War', by his voting record, although he's since come out and criticised the US (his birthplace, by the way) on his blog for human rights abuses, and is anti-ID cards and for an investigation into Iraq, but then so's Livingstone. Boris has also promised to publish the leaked documents about Bush's threat to bomb al-Jazeera:
http://www.boris-johnson.com/archive..._aljazeera.php
which must presumably make him a terrorist-loving anti-American liberal PC do-gooder, by the rules of right-wing wingnuttery. Actually, it's because he has a decent British sense of fair play and distaste for cover-up and hypocrisy, but they're easily confused in some quarters.
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Originally Posted by Boris
Some of us were so innocent as to suppose that the Pentagon had a well-thought-out plan for the removal of the dictator and the introduction of peace. Then we had the insurgency, in which tens of thousands have died.
Some of us thought it was about ensuring that chemical weapons could never again be used on Iraqi soil. Then we heard about the white phosphorus deployed by the Pentagon. Some people believed that the American liberation would mean the end of torture in Iraqi jails. Then we had Abu Ghraib.
Some of us thought it was all about the dissemination of the institutions of a civil society - above all a free press, in which journalists could work without fear of being murdered. Then we heard about the Bush plan to blow up al-Jazeera.
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