Can someone from TfL please tell me why I bother forking out £132.90 for a zone 1-4 travelcard when Oyster pre-pay users get free travel?

This month alone I could have got three days free due to faulty oyster readers, not to mention all of the delayed journeys I could have got a refund on due to ridiculous delays.

One day I had to totally abandon the Piccadilly Line at Hammersmith and get a bus down to Barnes to get on the mainline train. What a farce. The reason for the delay is always given as a frankly lame excuse, one morning it was a 'signal failure at Cockfosters' which was apparently responsible for me being stuck between Acton Town and South Ealing at 7pm, a whole 12 hours later.

Could they not have fixed it or turned the trains round at Arnos Grove instead? The good thing about a signal failure is that TfL admit it's their fault which means lucky Oyster pre-pay users can claim cash-back, it's too difficult if you have a season ticket though. You need to arrive very late enough times in a month to qualify for a bit of a rebate.

The service people with travelcards get for their cash is awful and if you're unlucky enough to live near a station, or bit of the line being renovated at the weekend, you're effectively paying a king's ransom to use a replacement bus service two days out of every seven.

I know stations need to be fixed-up, which is fine for safety reasons, but after weekend closures some stations have brand new video-screens running adverts along the platform wall. I hope they've been doing engineering works which were a bit more important than finding clever new ways to sell me stuff while I'm squashed on a platform.

Perhaps they should get the service running properly before trying to find new ways to make money? I doubt we'll even feel the benefit of the extra revenue, fares will no doubt rise next year, we'll all feel ripped off but there's no option outside TfL.

Still, at least we know some of the money is going to a good cause - replacing the bendy-buses with the new Routemaster, which incidentally we have to design ourselves on the TfL website. I was thinking of suggesting a long, single-decker design with the ability to bend around corners with plenty of space and entrances with an estimated cost of s0m. Hang-on, where have I seen one of those before?