Comment by vilmosi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vilmosi | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who lives in London, this is fake.

>> small flat in zone 4 paying out a minimum of £1200 pcm for a 1 bed flat,

Mate, I pay 1600 for a two bedroom big flat with an awesome view (zone 2). Prices didn't get that ridiculous yet.

>>> I was recently charged nine quid for two pints of ale and I took offence.

Fuck you, that's bullshit. If you actually paid that, you've been robbed.

>>>It is effectively out of service on weekends and bank holidays

Yeah, they need to do maintenance regularly, idiot. There's more than one way to get somewhere, you know? It's not like they close the city down.

TLDR this guy may have valid reasons to leave London and the article is well written, but a lot of "facts" are just plain made up or exaggerated.

EDIT

I misread as 9 quid for one pint. 9 for two pints is most definitely correct.

I don't agree with his negative attitude, but I don't think he's far off in terms of his facts:

- I think nine pounds for two pints of ale is about right anywhere in London. Go somewhere a bit cool and it's easily over ten

- I pay £1400 for a two bed in zone 2 which is cheap, I think the average is around £1600. I recently started looking at one beds in the same area and they are around £1200

I used to live in Chelsea (zone 1) in 1 bedroom flat and was paying 1300. This was last year.

- nine pounds a pint is excessive. Even at Hawksmoor it's half that. Wetherspoons a third that. Simply not true.

- yes, zone 2. He talks about zone 4.

He says 9 pounds for two pints. £4.50 a pint sounds about right for London.

Oh ouch, that was my incredibly dumb mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.

Not many places have higher prices for beer than London.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandcon...

Barcelona manages to keep its metro service running way more hours than London, and the tickets are a fraction of the price.

Barcelona has a population of about 1.6million. London has a population of about 8.5 million.

The London underground does have some problems - confusing fare structure; confusing Oyster cards; high levels of fake coins in the ticket machines; old tunnels and trains; very busy at some times, etc.

But it does pretty well considering.

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/what-we-do/london-und...

> Annual passenger numbers: 1.265 billion

Barcelona doesn't have to support the number of people that the London underground does.

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