I don't know what you're on about, but I am paying £2.90 to get from Brockley to Shoreditch High Street to get to work (7 miles in total). That's the same price I would pay for a bus I believe.
People presume that Berlin is the center of Germany, when in fact it absolutely isn't. Hamburg is a much more wealthy city that Berlin. Here's [1] the ticket prices for Hamburg [1] and here's [2] the ticket prices for London, are you seeing much difference?
I'm not super sure about the rings in Hamburg but: 7.80€ for "Hamburg AB All Day Ticket" vs £13.10 (=14.68€) for London zones 1-4 "1 day any time" from your links are a factor of 2 more expensive for London. As for what I'm on about the >5€ price for a single ride ticket: I simply took the OP at their word (they mentioned the ticket costing £4.90 in the quote above us - anecdotally I paid about that much when visiting London and staying at friends' places).
For Berlin I pay 760€ for a yearly ticket despite not living centrally (AB zone ticket still covers it). London zones 1-2 yearly ticket[1] is £1404 (=1574.45€) again factor of 2 more expensive.
When we lived in Vienna (a wealthy city, probably similar to Munich or Hamburg) transit prices were similar to Berlin (maybe even cheaper).
Not to mention that because London housing is so expensive most "common people" (who aren't living with room mates or are very wealthy) live in what we would consider a suburb rather than the city (in terms of distance from the city center) thus paying fares from further zones (iirc my friends at the time lived in zone 3 & were middle class professionals not paupers and/or with huge families).
If you're using Oyster or contactless payment there's a maximum fare that will be charged, after which all other travel is effectively free - this is different to a daily travel card. If you're staying within zone 1 & 2 that cap is £7, for a week fares will be capped at £35.10.
If I travelled into the centre of Munich every day (I'm in the 7th ring out of 16), it would cost me 1400 euros a year (a full network ticket would be 2700 euros!). That seems rather similar to London.
I don’t know about Munich, maybe it’s the exception in the German-speaking countries.
From 8 years of living in Vienna and 5 of living in Berlin transit costs were never significant to me & I never lived in the center of either city.
The numbers quoted from the links above line up with my gut feeling when visiting London (my feeling was even more extreme actually, but a few years ago the GBP was worth a lot more € than today).
I never said anything about whether or not this is justified only that I was surprised it was that expensive & that it’s more expensive than other places I’ve been to (including NYC, if you want to talk about global business/financial centers).
Zones 1-4 is the cheapest day ticket available, that’s why I took it as an example. Feel free to look into the provided links if you think there’s a better example listed.
I'm not debating that. London is over x2 the size of Hamburg. Towns that are in zone 4 are around 15km from the center of London, in zone 6 it's close to 30km. I live in London and commute everyday, I'm acutely aware of the cost of travel in the city.
