Last year, I wrote a post about how I had switched from using an annual travelcard to pay as you go for my public transport journeys. Well, it’s now time to look at how my travel in 2021 compared…
In 2021, I kept with the “pay as you go” approach and racked up a total of £1425.85 in journeys. That’s an increase over the £1354.30 in 2020 and is higher than the 1.6% average fares increase last year. A quick check shows I took 370 journeys in 2021 versus 322 in 2020. It’s more complicated though as different journeys have different prices and fare caps and so forth, but it does suggest that 2021 was definitely a year of being out and about more.
But what about comparing my pay as you go travel to the price of a travelcard? In 2021, a zone 1-4 travelcard (with a handful of additional journeys) would have cost me £2153.20. Therefore I saved over £700 by not taking that option. A wise choice and it looks like I’ll be sticking with it again this year.
Come back sometime next year and I’ll update on 2022 changes…
Just over seven years ago, I moved to London. Before that I had always had houses and jobs that I could either walk or drive between. Now though, I had to get the train every day, and also to pay for it. I started off paying for each journey from my Oyster card top up balance, but in January 2014, I realised that I was topping up a lot and that it might make more sense to get an annual travelcard. The main advantage of a travelcard being that all journeys within the chosen zones would essentially be free, so the more journeys made, the better the saving.
So why is that relevant? Well, I’ve kept a record of every journey I’ve made, and every January I compare how much I would have spent on pay as you go versus how much I paid for the travelcard (plus the extra journeys outside my travelcard zones). Unfortunately I no longer have the exact statistics for the first few years, but in 2017 I saved £246.50 (and I think a few of the earlier years were even bigger savings).
2017 Travelcard
2017 PAYG
£1581.70
£1828.20
Fast forward to 2018 and I moved house from zone 3 to zone 4. Now, not only was the travelcard cost more, but there were fewer transport options so I was less likely to use public transport. The calculations were more complex because I moved halfway through the year, but I think I ended up spending £96.40 extra by having a travelcard and not making the most of the journeys.
2018 Travelcard
2018 PAYG
£1869.90
£1773.50
For 2019, I decided to renew my travelcard. Yes, I had lost some money the previous year, but it was complex with moving house, and maybe I would make more journeys this year. And so, in January 2020 I calculated how much I had spent the previous year, and unfortunately found that I overspent by £234 by having a travelcard.
2019 Travelcard
2019 PAYG
£2052.80
£1818.80
In order to confirm my calculations (there’s daily and weekly PAYG capping I hadn’t taken into account), I decided to do a three month trial of using pay as you go (though obviously on contactless now, rather than having to top up an oyster card) until the end of April 2020. But then COVID and lockdowns came in, so my three month trial ended up becoming a one year trial. With an increased number of days working from home and less travel away from London, it should be clear that PAYG was going to win this year, but by how much? A couple of weeks ago I calculated my travel costs for 2020…
2020 Travelcard
2020 PAYG
£2086.80
£1354.30
With a £732.50 saving, PAYG was a clear winner for 2020. I imagine it will still be the best option for the rest of this year until things get back to normal again. I’ll review this again next January, but at the moment, I can’t see a travelcard being a sensible option for me, at least until I can make a lot more journeys.
On Monday morning I went to get the train to work. I missed the train by seconds. Whilst I waited for the next one, I thought about the sequence of events leading up to that moment and all the ways that I could have caught the train if only I had…
Left the house earlier – This is the most obvious answer but without hindsight it’s hard to know the effect that later actions had. It normally takes 10-12 minutes to walk to the station (depending on traffic). I normally give myself 12-15 mins just in case. On Monday I was getting close to my cut-off point and still wasn’t quite ready to leave. I could have rushed and probably made it, but the trains are every 15 minutes, so I thought I’d relax at home for a bit longer and then get the next one. I actually left the house with 16 minutes to get to the station, because on the way I wanted to…
Buy bananas – I mentioned the other week that I normally have a banana every day. I last went shopping on Friday morning and deliberately chose not to buy bananas because I knew they wouldn’t last until the end of this week when I next went shopping. I planned to buy bananas from the stall outside the station, but when I walked past M&S Food and saw there were no queues I decided to go there (this was actually a wise choice as the fruit stall only had green bananas). Whilst I was there, I remembered that I also needed to…
Buy shower gel – I ran out of shower gel a couple of days prior (don’t worry, I always have hotel toiletries for such emergency situations). I was planning to head to Sainsbury’s specifically for shower gel after work, but since I was in a supermarket already, why shouldn’t I just buy it here? Time was tight I thought, but I should be ok as long as I find what I want quickly. But I don’t shop much at M&S Food so it took me slightly longer than anticipated to find what I needed. Not to worry, there was no queue for the…
Automated checkout – I scanned the shower gel, tick. I selected ‘loose item’ and then ‘banana#, only for the machine to tell me “invalid item”. The assistant then pointed me to a separate scales where I had to weigh the bananas and print out a barcode for scanning. I then chose to pay, but the “invalid item” message popped up again, which the assistant then had to come back across to clear. That done, I still had about two minutes to get to the station, I just needed to…
Cross the road – There are two main road junctions I need to cross between my house and the station. They both have pedestrian sequences but they both really depend on the amount of traffic and turning up at the right point of the sequence. The first one was no problem on Monday given the reduced traffic and a bus that was conveniently waiting to turn the corner. The second junction was busier and I arrived halfway through one sequence of cars before the next car sequence and then the pedestrians. I could have made a dash for it, but road safety is important. Also, I could see that the train hadn’t arrived yet which meant I still had time to walk across and…
Touch in – I currently use contactless to pay for my journeys (I used to use oyster but that’s a topic for a future blog). Specifically I’ve been using Android Pay on my phone. I could hear the train coming in at this point, but the station entrance is towards the rear of the train and it would take time for the train to actually arrive at the platform. I hit my phone against the oyster pad and the contactless symbol showed up on my phone, but the oyster pad came up with an error message (I think it was error 67 “contactless payment not approved” but I didn’t really have to time to study it). I knew Android Pay worked because I had used it moments ago to pay for my bananas. I moved to the next oyster pad but the same error. The train had stopped by this point so I pulled out my wallet and tapped my actual contactless card. Success. Now all I had to do was…
Board the train – About 2.7 million people use my local station every year. Normally this means trains are quite busy with people getting on and off every time and so the trains normally stop for a good while. Not at the moment. With fewer people travelling to work it doesn’t take as long for the few people to board or alight. On a normal day, people would still be waiting to get on the train when I arrived onto the platform. On Monday, the train doors closed seconds before I could get to the train.
To get over to West London, I had to take three Overground trains, having to zig-zag across South London to get to West Brompton.
The museum is very small and only took about 5 minutes or so to look around, which was good as I didn’t have much time. The sign on the door implied that it was only open by appointment, whereas the website states that appointments are appreciated. When the man inside saw me peering through the door, he happily let me in. I wasn’t even the only person there in this small museum, as a group of three other people turned up when I was inside. The photo below pretty much shows the entirety of the museum.
One of the interesting items was a document detailing the requirements for police officers in 1829. Here are some of the more interesting ones:
* Your working hours will be eight, ten or twelve hour shifts, seven days a week. No rest days are allowed and only one week holiday per annum, unpaid.
* Every encouragement will be given to grow beards, as shaving is regarded as unhealthy. However, beards must not exceed two inches in length.
* You are NOT allowed to sit down in public houses at any time. [Does this include standing?]
* No meal breaks are allowed, the top hat may be used to hold a snack.
* Before attending for medical examination and interview to join the police it is advisable to have a bath.
Having seen most of the items in a few minutes (there wasn’t much to read), I headed back for my afternoon appointment. I decided to take a different route home, using the District line to Wimbledon where I changed to Tramlink. This was my first trip on London’s tram system and I planned to explore more of it and then get the bus home, however I realised I was quickly running out of time so transferred back to the Overground to complete the loop.
And I would have been back in time, if my afternoon engagement hadn’t been cancelled.
Several months ago I bought some fish from my local Food Assembly. Not having much clue what to do with so much fish, I put most of it in the freezer. Today seemed liked the perfect opportunity to use up one of the dabs I had stored.
Searching the internet, I came across Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Mediterranean-style Dab with bacon, olives, tomatoes and pine nuts. Surprisingly, this recipe was incredibly easy to follow and I completed it in the same time as stated (30 mins). The hardest part was eating it, given the amount I had on the plate (I served it with salad and new potatoes), and also the bones in the fish. A successful meal to round off the week.
