I had an interesting experience today – I swiped my Oyster Card and then remembered I had to top it up so I swiped back out the barriers. You’re not supposed to be charged in this situation, but when I went to a top-up machine it said my card was -£3! What??? Putting 1+1 together I then went to the ticket window and explained what had happened and the guy confirmed – I’d been charged £4 (as I’d had £1 on the card). No problems, he reversed the transaction and I topped up my card.

On the walk to work (where many of my “great thoughts” arise) I got to thinking – I walked roughly 10ft “round trip” so that makes the “journey” 40p/ft! Following on from this, it would surely make that kind of travel the most expensive, and most annoying as you’re locomoting yourself! Bought to you by our good old London Underground…

Carrying this silliness further I wondered how much would it cost to get to the US using such a pricing structure. A simple query to Wolfram Alpha (I knew it was good for something ;) reveals that it’s 1.832×10^7 feet from London to New York so simple arithmetic gives us a total cost of £7.3M or US$11.4M!!! Well that’s an expensive trip!

So, if you want to “one up” all your colleagues who are talking about Luxurious Cruises, Virgin Galactic and all those “cheap” forms of travel, just go to a tube station, walk in and out of the barriers and you’re then a member of a very exclusive club :-)