"We're like two incarnations behind the rest of the world on our fare system, and that's always the way it's been in New York," said Mr. Albert, who is a nonvoting member of the transit authority board.
In its reply it defends its overbooking policy, which "helps us avoid flying with empty seats, and means we can keep the cost of our fares down".
At which point the BA spokesman closed down the conversation, saying: "I cannot add anything more to our statement, I'm afraid, because we don't comment on the detail of our fares".
Some of our fares do look frankly punitive: the late, great Brian Redhead would be dismayed to see that a one-way, rush-hour train from his Macclesfield home to the BBC's Today programme in London will cost £157 from the New Year.
Jenny MacLeod, general manager for First in Bristol, Somerset and Avon, said: "We understand this will not be welcome news, but we need to revise some of our fares to ensure they adequately cover the costs we face in operating buses in this part of the world".
He said: "Applying the principles of fairness that led to our fares cut plan, I want to help young Londoners with their education by easing the squeeze the Tory-led government has imposed on them, and which the Tory Mayor has totally ignored.
We are very greedy and we take up more than our fare share of the earth's resources.
"This was anticipated given the acknowledged success of our MetroCard fare discount program," Mr. O'Leary said.
Frank Bruni reviewed pizza places across the city, $5 slices make news, and we use the prevailing price of a slice as a barometer of our subway fare.
He declared: "Passenger volumes in the third quarter grew by 30% when many of our high fare competitors were grounding planes and making staff redundant".
Happily, we had a whole show planned out before that happened, so after cleaning up Musk's latest we tucked into a bit of our normal fare: big rounds, IPOs and venture moves.
