>>1184661London has been heading towards streamlining their systems to remove the need for payment by physical change. The smart card (Oyster) which has had talks about being updated again with another new system.
Its just a debit card for travel that can have money put on or withdrawn at local grocery stores or train stations. It's capability spans most forms of travel provided by Londons standalone public travel company (TFL) which include buses and trams on top of trains. It is basically obsolete currently as debit cards are handed out by banks with this capability built in for a few years now(contactless payment) and phones have also adapted their software to these forms of payments (apple and google pay) allowing most phones that have NFC capability to use.
I believe that as fares go, all electronic forms of payment are all standardised to the oysters rates and physical tickets are a little extra in the very few places you can pick them up as it's around 7-8 bucks to get an oyster from a station and it's added onto the card itself so it's essentially free.
For the most part all travel on the underground is zone based and increases in cost the more zones you go through as a difference not a collective. So you could go through zone 1 and 2 a few times but it will only charge you for the 1 zone difference. 3 or more zones and it starts to get quite expensive for frequent travel and subsequent packages that you can apply to your oyster like monthly tickets also scale up in price the same way
