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Getting Around London: The Tube, the Bus, and the Oyster Math That Saves £40

Getting around London without overpaying is mostly maths nobody explains: contactless vs Oyster vs Travelcard, daily caps, and the days the bus quietly beats the Tube.

If you want the whole thing mapped out, see the London itinerary with an interactive map.

Getting around London is genuinely simple once someone does the maths for you, and the trouble is nobody does. So tourists rock up, panic at a ticket machine, and buy the most expensive option on the menu — a paper Travelcard or some “London tourist pass” — when the cheapest one was sitting in their pocket the whole time. Their bank card. Let me save you about £40 over a long weekend.

I learned this the dumb way years ago, buying a 7-day paper Travelcard for a 4-day trip because the man in the booth suggested it. Lost a clear tenner-plus to that. Now I just tap and forget. Here’s the actual system.

London’s Tube, buses, trams, the DLR, the Overground and most rail in the centre all take contactless — your debit/credit card or your phone with Apple/Google Pay. You tap the yellow reader going in, tap out again on the Tube (not on buses), and the system charges you the right fare automatically.

The killer feature: it caps. Once you’ve spent the daily cap, every other journey that day is free. The cap inside zones 1–2 is about £8.90 a day. So the absolute most a normal central day of Tubing costs you is under nine quid, even if you ride twelve times. You don’t pre-buy anything, don’t calculate anything, don’t queue.

An Oyster card does exactly the same caps as contactless. The only reasons to bother: you don’t have a contactless card, your card charges foreign transaction fees (some do — check), or you want a physical souvenir. Otherwise it’s an extra £7 deposit and a top-up faff for zero benefit. Skip it.

And the paper Travelcard or the touristy “Visitor Oyster” with a markup? Almost always worse than just tapping and letting the cap do its job. The one edge case: if you’re doing several long days way out in the zones, or travelling with kids (under-11s go free with a tapping adult on Tube and bus), the maths shifts — but for a standard central-London trip, contactless wins.

Here’s the bit that actually saves money and is more pleasant: the bus is a flat £1.75 per journey, anywhere, no zones, and it has its own friendly twist — the Hopper fare lets you take unlimited buses within an hour for that single £1.75. Three buses in an hour? Still £1.75.

Buses also cap (around £5.25 a day for bus-and-tram), and that bus spend rolls into your overall daily cap too. For short central hops — say, Covent Garden down to the river — the bus is often quicker than going down into a station, and you actually see London instead of a tunnel. Grab the top deck, front seats. Best free tour in the city.

When does the Tube still win? Long distances and crossing the river fast. Bank to Heathrow, you take the train. Trafalgar Square to the South Bank, you walk or bus it.

You must tap out on the Tube and rail or you get charged a max fare — easy to forget when you’re chatting. On buses you only tap in, never out.

Walking is wildly underrated here. Central London is small and the Tube map lies about distances — Leicester Square to Covent Garden is one stop and a literal 4-minute walk. I’ve watched people queue for a train to go 250 metres. Don’t.

And the night Tube runs on the weekend on a few lines, which is genuinely useful, but check which lines — it’s not all of them.

Tap your contactless card or phone everywhere. Take buses for short central trips, the Tube for distance, and walk anything under fifteen minutes. Let the daily cap protect you from ever overpaying. Do not buy a pass, a Travelcard, or a tourist ticket. That’s the whole strategy, and it’ll quietly save you the price of a nice dinner over four days.

It’s almost annoying how simple it is once the booth-salesman noise is stripped out. The system does the optimising for you — you just have to not get talked out of it.

Tap one card, ride the bus more than you think, walk the short hops, and London’s transport stops being a money pit. The cap’s got your back.

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