Boris the bus czar shouldn't force us to buy Oysters

It must be difficult enough to be Mayor when you go out into society, what with everyone wanting to share their grievances about their bin collections.

But fancy what it'll be like for Boris at parties when every arrival who's been delayed on account of Tube problems blames him personally.

Everyone who uses public transport - viz, all of us - will have a wish-list for him: let me get mine in first.

TfL's decision to scrap bus saver tickets from saturday will make life that little bit worse. These are books of tickets, six for six quid, each of which is worth a single bus journey. They are the standby for when your Oyster card doesn't have enough money on it and you find yourself in that great tract of central London where buses don't take cash fares. (Don't let's get started on the ticket machines at bus stops, which only take exact change - when they work.) The savers are cheap and handy - and, usefully for visitors, don't involve buying an Oyster card. So we will be obliged instead to use the Oyster. It's convenient, of course, but for those of us who use pay-as-you-go cards, it is practically impossible to remember how much you have on it. And the time you find you're 10p short of a bus fare is when you're in a hurry and you can't afford to run to a Tube station to top it up. in theory, your available balance shows up on a little screen when you run your card over the reader when you get on a bus. But you have to be quick off the mark and with exceptional eyesight to read the figure that comes up. It disappears in a flash, leaving you peering at a dark screen, with half a dozen would-be passengers behind you. on the Tube I can never remember if the figure that comes up on the screen when I pass my card over the reader is the amount I've just spent on my fare or the credit that remains. Isn't there some way the oyster card can be reconfigured so as to show the amount of money it's worth at any time? Moreover, the little bleep that the scanner makes if your card hasn't been swiped properly is hard to detect.

There have been a couple of cases recently of perfectly respectable individuals being threatened with court action after an inspector found that they hadn't swiped their oyster card properly when they boarded their bus - well, I can see how it might have happened.

As for Tube fares, their rationale is a mystery. For some tickets there are peak and off-peak prices. For others, it's the same fare all day. on the TfL website I found that a ticket from Kensington High street to Hammersmith is £1.50 at any time; from King's Cross, also in Zone 1, to Hammersmith it's £2 peak, £1.50 offpeak. Why?

One other thing. Mr Johnson famously likes his bike. But for his new job, let him take the bus and Tube, and see how he likes it.