An analogy would be the energy market, where there used to be lots of interesting tariffs available for those people who could be bothered to put some effort in to find one that suited their usage profile best.
That, to be fair, can also be written as follows:
"An analogy would be the energy market, where suppliers used to add lots of confusing tariffs, in the hope that only a few people could be bothered to put in some effort to find the one that suited their usage profile best".
The system was a mess, and it *wasn't* for the benefit of the majority of customers.
I don't think that's quite so true of the rail fares system (inconsistencies aren't deliberate - i.e. cock-up rather than conspiracy), but it is to an extent.
But if it's too complicated for rail industry staff to learn their own products, then we'll probably end up with more nanny-state simplification, to the detriment of the more clued-up passengers.
While I am what you might term a clued-up passenger, I don't feel I should need to work that way and am in support of genuine simplification even if that does remove what might be termed loopholes. One way to handle this for travel across London (and you won't like it!) is that a cross London through ticket - any cross London through ticket - is simply the sum of the bit to London and the bit from it, with restrictions applied to both bits.
That's sort of how cross-London seasons work - if one doesn't exist (I believe Bletchley-Slough was calculated for me, but was later put on the system) it's the sum of an outboundary Travelcard season from the origin and the destination minus the cost of a 1-6 inboundary Travelcard so you're not paying for that bit twice.
Neil
