Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

I used my Oyster Card for the first time last Monday (29 September), on a day trip to London. I've had it for about a year, but owing to cirumstances beyond my control I didn't have chance to use it until then. It still had the initial £5.00 credit from when I first ordered it. After checking out the Transport for London website, I decided to put an extra £5.00 onto it to tide me over. I used the TfL website to add a fiver about three weeks ago. I had an email telling me that it was only valid for seven days, and needed to be 'activated' at my nominated station (Earls Court) before it would be added to my balance. If it wasn't activated, it would be automatically refunded to my bank account. Needless to say, I was travelling nine days later. When I arrived in London, I therefore had to put a further five quid onto my card to see me through the day. I made the most of the card, mind you: one tube journey in Zone 1, and five bus journeys in Zones 1 and 2. To put this...

Our student halls at Brunel University were in a village called Cowley, just about a mile or so from Uxbridge itself. Cowley is as far west in Greater London as you can go without falling in the Grand Union Canal. Even though it meant nothing to any of us at the time, it's a stone's throw from a place called Little Britain. (Please feel free to read the rest of this in Tom Baker's voice if you like.) It placed us very firmly in the Outer Zone of the London Transport network. As you can imagine, it didn't take long before I started exploring the place. We were about a minute's walk from one main road, the A408 between Uxbridge and Heathrow Airport. By cutting across the campus for a few minutes you could get to the A4020, the road into Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush. In those days, bus travel was cheap – a 'short hop' of up to a mile cost the huge sum of 20p, and a longer journey in the Outer Zone was capped at 30p. At the time (1984-5), Ken Livingston...