{"id":1908,"date":"2007-04-17T21:35:03","date_gmt":"2007-04-17T21:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2007\/04\/oyster_cards\/"},"modified":"2007-04-17T21:35:03","modified_gmt":"2007-04-17T21:35:03","slug":"oyster_cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/oyster_cards\/","title":{"rendered":"Oyster Cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The London <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/england\/london\/6564033.stm\">news today<\/a> is that the Mayor is giving away 100,000 free Oyster Cards to people who don&#8217;t yet have one. This is an attempt by Transport for London to get some of the die hards who&#8217;ve not yet got one, to get around to picking one up.<br \/>\nOrdinarily you have to pay a &#8220;deposit&#8221; of &pound;3 to get one. Once you have one, you&#8217;re entitled to discounted public transport tickets&#8230; Well I say &#8220;discounted&#8221;, when what I really mean is that, if you <I>don&#8217;t<\/I> have an Oyster Card, you have to pay significantly <I>more<\/I> for your travel.<br \/>\nWhy is this initiative limited to 100,000? Why doesn&#8217;t TfL just make Oyster Cards free for everyone all the time? You see, while I might have &#8220;Big Brother&#8221; issues with the ability of the authorities to track you around London, I have an even bigger issue with the fact that the really big losers are tourists and visitors to London.<br \/>\nWhy should a tourist have to fill out a form, put down a &#8220;deposit&#8221; for a plastic card, just to travel around London at a reasonable cost? Sure, they can get their cash back at the end of their visit, but who&#8217;s really going to bother with that? And I&#8217;m not just talking about overseas visitors &#8211; I&#8217;m also talking about those who come from other parts of the UK to visit London. It&#8217;s just not fair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The London news today is that the Mayor is giving away 100,000 free Oyster Cards to people who don&#8217;t yet have one. This is an attempt by Transport for London to get some of the die hards who&#8217;ve not yet got one, to get around to picking one up. Ordinarily you have to pay a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}