Public transport in London is anything but cheap. It is simply the most expensive urban public transport system I know of in terms of cost of monthly passes (or travelcards). Currently a monthly travelcard in zones 1-2 is £116.80 ($177.30). In comparison, a similar monthly pass in New York costs $112, $74 in San Francisco, $167 in Tokyo, $84.50 in Paris, $99.95 in Berlin, $100 in Chicago, $67.96 in Melbourne and so on.

£116 a month for unlimited travel around the city really pales into insignificance against even the average IT salary.

In many towns and cities outside of London you would need a car to get to work which would cost much more, even without the London uplift in salary.

That's for zones 1-2. If you live in those zones, you probably pay quite a lot for rent. If you live further out, monthly travel cards cost more.

It's not unlimited - just zones 1-2 and the tube shuts down around 12 making it a pain to come back home after a night out.

You also get unlimited bus travel through all of London and if you're on a travel card, you can safely travel overground to any station without exit gates without fear of paying extension charges.

You can take buses from anywhere, I think you're forgetting. That's still a good deal.

I'm not particularly familiar with most of those cities, but the transportation system in SF is a joke compared to London's.

When pricing public transport in London, you have to consider the sheer abundance of it. Zone one and two are littered with tube and bus stops, and there are plenty of interconnects. I haven't spent too much time in NY and SF, but their public transport systems seemed very awkward in comparison.

Not sure what these prices are based on, but in Tokyo a monthly pass for all of a zone doesn't even exist - you'd get a pass for a specific route from station A to station B only, with no buses and so on.

"Tokyo Metro All-Line Pass" http://www.tokyometro.jp/en/ticket/types/pass

That's a good find, but note that the name is a bit misleading: "Tokyo Metro" is only one of many train/subway corporations in Tokyo, so the pass is far more restrictive than the London one. There are a few company-specific passes like this but they're rarely economical since you have to change company to get pretty much anywhere except on your own line.

Yes, and I pay about that much petrol month just in petrol to get to work. London's a swings and roundabouts thing, I can see the attraction TBH.

Buses in London are a lot cheaper, it's £1.40 a trip, but the trips can be much longer than the relative speediness of the tube.

The bus is £2.40 now ...

The overwhelming majority of non-season ticket bus fares are paid via Oyster. The cost for paying by Oyster is £1.40

You can also pay for buses using a credit/debit card with contactless payment for £1.40, which is pretty cool (particularly when my Oyster credit runs out) http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/26416.aspx

BTW I work/have worked in other companies in the Forward group, the parent of Forward Labs, and can confirm it really is a great place to work

> London cost of living isn't so bad.

Really? London has the highest rent and house prices in the UK.

The average rental for a 1 bedroom flat is about £1200 a month, if you attribute that to the average UK salary of about £26k that's about 70% of your take home (monthly) pay.

I agree that the other costs are mainly in line with the rest of the country, although the tube is very expensive (buses are much cheaper)

As mentioned, people get around this by house sharing in dodgy areas with a commute on top. This isn't great from quality of life perspective but that's another conversation.

London housrhold incomes (rather than salaries) are much higher than UK average so calculating as a percentage of that £26k is misleading.

The cost of living is absolutely awful in London.

You'll be fine doing a flat share etc in some of the nicer metropolitan bits, but if you have 3 children like myself, things get expensive awfully quickly.

You have to fish out £1500/month for a 3 bedroom house in a suburban area (zone 5/6) which you won't get stabbed in.

If you want something really nice, say Richmond/Strawberry Hill, try £2250 for the same.

A US HR consulting firm called Mercer ranks cities by their cost of living for expats -- what a professional-class resident would expect to pay. They rated London in 2012 at #25 in the world, and more expensive than any US city.

http://www.mercer.com/costoflivingpr#City_rankings