How much is a single fare for London local bus or for underground subway train? Is it equivalent of around $2.00 per shot or less??? I think one day, off peak london tourist day ticket is about $11. Comments???

A cash fare within Zone 1 costs £3 - with an Oyster Card it's half that.

A one-day Travelcard for Zones 1 & 2 is £4.90 ($9US). If you get an Oyster Card, a day's travel caps at £4.40 for Tube and bus, or £3 for bus only.

Are you in town for just the one day?

Hi Robespierre,

Thanks for your response.
Please expand a little on what an Oyster card is and do we have to get it before arriving or can we get it there? We will have 2 1/2 to 3 days in London. Which is best off peak travel card or this Oyster. I thought I saw equiv of $11 and not $9. Please direct me to where you saw equivalent of $9.00. We leave Los Angeles for London on July 5. Thanks

A cash fare for any bus journey in London is £1.50.
A one-day off-peak travelcard is £4.90 for zones 1-2 (central London, including Greenwich) or £6.30 for zones 1-6 (all of Greater London, including Heathrow and Hampton Court).
There are numerous other combinations. All are on www.tfl.gov.uk.

The set up in London is done to discourage single fares and to use fare cards of various sorts and no it is not best to get it before arrival in London.

There are threads descibing the oyster card and its use and you can read up about it on the transport for London web site. Basically it is a card with a chip which, in this case, would have prepaid fares. The only draw back is that it requires a £3 deposit which I think is easy to refund before leaving say if you are using public transport to get to the airport or on the last night in London.

You load money (British pounds of course) onto it and every time you get on a bus you touch the card against a yellow reader and the amount of the fare is deducted from your account; simple enough. The fare, as pointed out before, on the bus is 80p (£1 between 0700 and 0930) and on the tube is £1.50 as opposed to paying cash (£1.50 on the bus and £3 on the tube) but the nice thing is there are daily caps...£3 for the bus only and £4.40 if you use the tube at least once and your first use of it is after 0930 on weekdays...now if you don't want oyster you can purchase at any tube station a 1 day pass for central London after 0930 on weekdays and all weekend for £4.90 and for the buses only with no 0930 restruction £3.50.

You can read the complete table of fares on the tfl web site...oyster is not available before you leave and there are no great bargains and no advantage in the slightest to buying London transportation passes before you leave...it is very easy to deal with upon arrival and you will find most clerks very knowledgeable and helpful in selling you what is best (the set up for children is extremely complicated now as kids under 16 now go free on buses and on the tube non peak hours and it really is a mess but for the adults it's somewhat straight forward). I must say however on my last trip to London I ran into a clerk at Waterloo when I got off Eurostar and bought my 1 week card and then asked her for £1.80 in extension fares she asked me why I wanted the £1.80..okay she was trying to be helpful. When I told her for my return trip out to Heathrow, she told me it was only £1...no I had to tell her, during the hours from 0700 to 1900 on weekdays it's £1.80...she checked saw that I was right, mumbled something under her breath, and then didn't give me the little wallet to put the oyster card in to protect it.

Oh well.

jaydh: You don't need a ticket for all the zones. Zones 1 and 2 will cover all you're likely to need. If you do need to travel further afield, you can pay an add-on fare.

For 2-3 days, you can get paper travelcards and not worry about Oyster. The advantage to it is a bit of extra flexibility and ease of adding extra payments to it as you go along. This is obviously of greater benefit for people who are here for the longer term. For your timespan, you might just as well buy paper cards by the day, or a three-day card.

Patrick...the great beauty of oyster is the flexibility it provides not to have to decide early in the morning just how much public transport you will be using that day...while I would be the first to agree it's no big deal in the scheme of things, often in the past I have bought a travelcard with every intention of making several tube trips that day and ended up doing a couple of bus rides....with oyster you have the total flexibility of not paying more than a one day travelcard with a 50p deduction but not paying a single penny more then what you end up doing that day and it really isn't all that ocmplicated (unless you're 16 to 17 years old good luck in figuring out whether you need a picture or not)...besides it saves at least 3 seconds in entering the system as you merely touch the yellow reader rather than inserting your ticket and waiting for it to be read! And with the machines, it's very easy to add money...I would certainly opt for oyster and no it's not complicated at all.

My recommendations:

Buy an Oyster Card.
Load £10 on it.
Get on the train.
If you need more money on the card, top it up.

All the fares are at

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/fares-tick...fares-2006.pdf

Thanks all for your responses here. This can get a little confusing, you must admit. What about the 10 use carnet card for my wife and I. Of the 2 1/2 -3 days, one day will be utilized taking the Original Bus Tour. If not this, I think the one day travel card will work for us.

If you get an Oyster card and load it for PAYG, you will spend less than for one-day Travelcards, no matter what else happens. This is because Oyster caps at 50p less than the price of a Travelcard.

If you need a ride to get from your hotel to the tour bus and/or back, you will pay full cash fares instead of Oyster rates. Why would you want to do that?

By the way, for £3 you can see the same sights as the tours charge $30 for with your Oyster and this map: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/cen_bus.pdf

Robes...

I've always been a proponent of using the bus map and using the regular buses as applied to the open air buses but you don't get the commentary that you do on the hop on and off bus despite the large price differential.

To each his own.

It seems to me that $33 is a lot to pay for a little information that can be found in guide books.

The AAA Spiral Guide to London actually has a #15 bus tour describing in geographical sequence the sights you pass between Marble Arch and The Tower.

Myriad free guides are available from any Tourist Information Centre.

What is the current price for a 10 (ten) Carne Tube Ticket pass. I know it is only good for zone 1 and in January of 2004 it cost 15GBP. Can't seem to be able to find current price. It's not shown at www.tfl.gov.uk. Anyone know for sure. Thanks.

The Tube Carnet is history. As I said at 10:09, <u>all</u> the fares are in the brochure.

I am guessing here, but I would think carnets no longer exist now that Oyster has been introduced: the drive is towards eliminating paper tickets.

The #15 bus can be picked up anywhere along Oxford Street goes down Oxford Street to Oxford Circus turns right down Regent Street through Picadilly Circus turns right down the Haymarket passing the theatre where Phantom of the Opera is playing into Trafalgar Square turning down the Strand past St. Paul's into the City towards the Tower past the Tower of London to Tower Bridge which is almost the exact route followed by one of the hop on hop off buses and you can absolutely hop on and off anywhere you want...

From Oxford Circus you can pick up the #12 which follows the same route but turns right at Trafalgar Square down Whitehall past the government ministries, the PM's residence (10 Downing Street) to Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square turning left across Westminster Bridge by the London Eye and the Acquarium and you can stay on it to Elephant &amp; Castle and thereabouts where will be found the Imperial War Museum...

I don't have much to do this afternoon, so I think I'll diagram that first sentence.

Very funny Robes! They must have stopped issuing the carne 10 ticket within the past year. Although the 2006 guide book mentions it, I know it was writtenh in 2005 when it must have still been available, correct? Thanks for your thoughts!

Yeah - it probably went away with the wholesale changes that were made in January. I have the 1 Sep 05 TfL brochure, and it was still being sold then.

Thanks for all your thoughts and comments. We are now actually leaning toward taking the public buses, as suggested, for the price of a 24 hour tourist travel card.