Making it free just for residents is an interesting choice. I guess the argument is that they’re paying taxes to cover the use while non residents are, but then you have to maintain all of the ticketing infrastructure for much lower revenue. They’ve also banned taking bikes on the trams as part of this, which isn’t great.
I don’t like the idea of requiring folks have chips on them & needing bank accounts to access transport. Worse if a for-profit payment processor gets to skim a little off on every transaction.
All of these devices emit traceable signals. If someone doesn’t want to be tracked, which there are tools that do this, folks should have the option to opt out as paper & coins have worked fine for a millennia. But also what you are now proposing is that Google & Apple, two ad companies, get to take a piece of the pie for doing nothing and collecting that user data of what user is going where/when.
Bruh, those payment methods are ubiquitous in developed countries, like those in Europe.
the advantage of credit/debit cards is that you don’t need to fucking buy some obscure city specific card for public transport or need to figure out the tickets, you just tap your card when you get on.
I live in Asia & I’m real happy cash is preferred for everywhere. It’s not some tech startup or credit card’s business how/when I’m spending my money & it’s never been difficult to hand currency to the driver.
Then I guess you’ve never met the most populated continent that seems to be alright as is.
But also we could have free transit before the internet. Wrapping something in technology doesn’t mean its better. A smart watch doesn’t tell you the time any better than are without Bluetooth.
It’s not too make money but they still need money to run it, and in a lot of places a significant portion of that comes from fares. If they’re replacing all of it with money coming from elsewhere then great.
That’s why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
Introducing something variable or unpredictable into public transit would probably deter a few people from using it
From an efficiency perspective this makes sense, but I don’t like it to be honest. The long distance trains do that here and it’s very off putting, although I can understand why - the trains are already usually very overcrowded, long and don’t fit in most stations, no funding is available to extend the platforms any further, and companies can’t buy newer, denser, faster trains because the railway electrify project is decades late…
As an alternative I’d propose increasing the frequency of the trams if possible, or maybe even use longer trams during those times if the stops are suitably long
Great news everyone! Hopefully the system works well and other cities will follow suit. I know in the USA (in the few places we do have public transit) the argument for keeping fares is always 1.we don’t want to pay taxes for that and 2.if we charge that’ll keep the vagrants from using it. Two arguments that make no sense at all, 1. We already pay taxes for the public transit, why pay more to actually use it? And 2.anyone who has used public transit knows the fare doesn’t keep vagrants out.
In the short term, there’s also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
My home city of Riga tried to do that after success in Tallinn. The mayor thought of releasing special Riga cards to residents. The issue was that many people come to Riga for work from other cities, towns and villages and they got angry to pay for transport. So mayor said to declare themselves in Riga instead of their home towns. That caused an uproar from town councils as that meant that they will lose all the tax income and won’t be able to provide local services. And Riga is already home to a third of the country’s population, so town budgets are overstretched.
In the end the government had to step in and ban the whole thing. The end.
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