The World Isn't Your Oyster

On my birthday three years ago, I was making my regular visit to London when the front page of the Western Mail caught my eye in Cardiff. I can't remember the exact headline, but it seemed that a committee of the Welsh Assembly had recommended an Oyster-style card covering the whole of Wales.

The first thing that came into my head was 'What a good idea!'

As a frequent visitor to London, I'd found out just how efficiently the Oyster card allows you to travel around the city. I'd also found out how much money it can save you over a period of time. (Or even a single day, when you compare it to the Travelcard.)

I bought the paper and read the full story on the coach. The second thing that came into my head was 'What a stupid idea!'

You see, the contrast between London and Wales couldn't be more apparent. Greater London is pretty much one continuous, flattish, dense urban sprawl covering over 1,500 square kilometres. It's criss-crossed by dozens of railway lines, Underground lines, bus routes and trams (in and around Croydon), and it's divided into eight zones radiating from the centre. The Oyster card is valid on pretty much all of them. Depending on how far you travel, the most you'll pay per day is capped. I usually stick to Zones 1 and 2, so I pay £6.60 (regardless of how many times I enter and leave the TfL system). The most I've paid is £12.00, which took me all the way to High Barnet, at the end of the Northern Line. The Oyster card also covers you for travel into parts of Hertfordshire, Essex, Surrey and Kent, so you really do get value for money.

On the other hand, Wales is a mountainous, thinly populated land, with a handful of large cities, many smaller towns, hundreds of remote villages, and thousands of isolated hamlets, spread throughout nearly 21,000 thousand square kilometres. There's a railway line running from east to west in the south, pretty much parallel with the coast, and another following the coast to the north. There's another line which runs halfway down the west coast, another one that almost traverses North-east Wales, and a line that actually leaves Wales and passes through England on its journey from north to south. A smaller line weaves its way from Aberystwyth through mid-Wales to Shrewsbury; another winds from Llanelli through mid-Wales to Shrewsbury. And, of course, a network of lines radiates out from the centre of Cardiff, through the suburbs, southwards into the Vale of Glamorgan and northwards into the Valleys.

Now, you might think that most of the gaping holes in the rail network would be filled by buses.

You'd be dead wrong.

There are long-distance services such as the T4, linking Cardiff to Newtown via Pontypridd, Merthyr Tydfil, Brecon, Builth Wells and Llandrindod Wells. To get from (say) Aberdare to Brecon you'd need to travel to Merthyr Tydfil first. You could just about fit it into a normal working day ‐ assuming you finished work in the centre of Brecon by 5.00 p.m. – but it's useless otherwise. But how about from Treorchy – just over the mountain – to Brecon? Forget about it! You'd have to travel to Pontypridd first, and the journey times make it impractical for a daily commute.

For shorter journeys, you're at the mercy of the huge national operators (Stagecoach and First Bus), or the semi-municipal companies like Cardiff Bus, or local outfits like Edwards, Thomas, Harris and Phil Anslow. Their journeys average roughly seven or eight kilometres; for instance, the furthest that Stagecoach runs from Aberdare is to Pontypridd. Yes, that's right – you can't even travel directly from Aberdare to Cardiff any more; you have to change at Pontypridd. Furthermore, hardly any of these companies work together to provide connecting services, and few of them accept each other's tickets (except for the Network Rider, of which more anon). That all adds to the cost, of course.

The fact is that travelling from north to south (in most of the Valleys, at least) is relatively easy. The bus routes and/or railway lines follow the topography, and where there's a river you'll more than likely find a transport route alongside it. Going from east to west is another matter altogether, as I've discussed several times in my less than enthusiastic take on the South Wales Metro plans.

Even travelling from Aberdare to Merthyr Tydfil by train involves a southward journey to Abercynon, a delay of up to fifteen minutes during the day (and longer again in the evenings), and a northward journey to Merthyr. The same on the return leg. And are you really beginning your journey in Aberdare and ending it in Merthyr? You're far more likely to have to travel into Aberdare from wherever you live, and then travel on from Merthyr when you get there. That's where the journey times (and prices) really start to stack up.

Let's take a simple example: a woman living in Glynhafod – who doesn't drive – needs to take her young son to Prince Charles Hospital. That's a return bus ticket from Glynhafod to Aberdare (price currently unavailable online, but unlikely to weigh in at less than a fiver), then a return rail ticket from Aberdare to Merthyr Tydfil (£4.10), and then a return ticket from Merthyr to the hospital (£3.30). Plus the ticket(s) for her son, who is over five years old and therefore has to hold a valid ticket. Journey time: about two hours.

We're talking about twenty quid for the journey – one adult and one child.

There is, of course, the Stagecoach All Zone Megarider ticket. (I knew Arriva Trains Wales operated a Zone system on the Valley Lines, and I presume Transport for Wales does as well. But that Stagecoach in South Wales has zones came as news to me.) Since the bus runs direct from Glynhafod to Merthyr Tydfil, it would be cheaper (and quicker) to go that way. The connecting journey would be included in the one ticket. I can't give you the current price, as Stagecoach South Wales are currently updating their website. From memory, it's about £8.00. Journey time: an hour and a half.

That's not too bad, I hear you say.

And you'd be right. Until you consider that the woman already pays £13.40 for an Aberdare Megarider to get to and from work every day. Suddenly she's having to pay an additional £8.00 or so for a one-off journey, half of which is already covered by the Aberdare Megarider.

An Oyster style scheme would – in theory – do away with this problem. She could simply load enough credit onto her card on the Monday to include the journey to Prince Charles, and the onboard computers would calculate the difference automatically when she got on and off in Merthyr. Any remaining credit would roll over to the following week, and everything would balance out over time.

Of course, every single bus operator in Wales, as well as Transport for Wales, would need to sign up to be part of the scheme. And this is why I'm writing this entry today.

I recently made an appointment to visit the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, a short distance from Talbot Green. Getting to the hospital itself isn't a problem; it's a 25-minute bus journey from Pontypridd. I'm already covered as far as Pontypridd with my own Aberdare Megarider, so I'll only need to find the extra fare for the return trip to Ynysmaerdy. However, it's a different operator – New Adventure Travel. Ideally, I'd like to take a little detour into Talbot Green (a short distance from the hospital) to catch up with a friend who's just moved there from Aberdare.

The big question is whether N.A.T. issue a ticket which I could then use to hop about the area in the same way as one can with an Aberdare Dayrider.

Needless to say, there's no fare information on their website, and the Traveline Cymru website says only that the information will be available 'soon'. I think it's been saying that for the last five years or so.

The alternative is a Network Rider, available on several different operators throughout South-east Wales. By the time I need to travel, it will cost £9.00 for a day. Add that to the £13.40 I'm already paying for my Megarider, and it's becoming an expensive week. It still falls some way short of the £28.00 for a Weekly Network Rider, which is the next step up. But I'm already covered from Aberdare to Pontypridd – because of which I was able to save over a fiver on my recent journey to Bristol (see To Split or Not to Split). I just need something that will allow me to travel fairly freely on New Adventure Travel services in and around Llantrisant. I don't know whether such a ticket even exists, as their website tells me next to nothing and they don't feed the information through to Traveline Cymru either. I know their tickets aren't cheap, because a single from Old Ynysybwl to Pontypridd cost me £2.90 a few months ago.

N.A.T.'s predecessor, the late unlamented Shamrock Travel, didn't even accept the Network Rider, if my memory serves me correctly. This is why I said that every operator needs to come on board (sorry!) any smartcard scheme the Senedd might introduce in the future.

I'll let you know how I get on in September. All this might be academic anyway. If the weather is fine, I might buy a return ticket to Talbot Green to begin with. I can walk to and from the hospital, and still meet my friend for a coffee. But it would be nice to know there was a cost-effective solution to the problem of crossing between bus operators, especially when one is already holding a weekly ticket for one of them.

Still, my friend has only recently graduated, so she must be in her early to mid-twenties. Maybe when she's my age she'll be able to report a positive development in this regard. As always, watch this space …