They seem like a pretty natural successor to the punch card model, which I can't imagine had a motive beyond the obvious.
Less cynically, a good national policy might be to treat all "excess" revenues collected by organizations providing better deals to those passing various wealth/class/fluency tests ("has bank account", "has smart phone", etc.) as "poor taxes". Which are totally legal...but must be accounted for in excruciating detail, and every last farthing turned over to the greedy nitpickers staffing the Poor Tax Dept. of His Majesty's Revenue Authority. Every month, no excuses. So, to avoid that monthly misery for their so-privileged selves, the managers at every org with the paper power to collect poor taxes work hard to make sure that they are not doing so.
Then why did they remove the option that has them "work[ing] at taking your fare" once per month and leave in the one that has them doing that four times per month?
Hell, one can pay cash on the bus itself for a ticket to ride the bus. If cash-handling were the motivation, that'd be the first to go... the author of TFA mentions "First's weekly bus pass" and that they're in Scotland. This leads me to a company called "FirstGroup", which operates "First Bus" and "First Train". First Bus has this to say [0][1] about acquiring tickets on a bus:
With a wide range available, including weekly and monthly tickets, there’s no need to have the right change as you can make your purchase in advance. ... Contactless payments, Apple pay, Google pay and cash are accepted on our buses.
[0] <https://www.firstbus.co.uk/buy-tickets/buy-ticket>
[1] You might note that First Bus says it operates in England and Ireland but makes no mention of Scotland. IDK why that is, but this Scottish tourism website [2] links straight to First Bus's website to answer the question "Where can I find accessible bus and coach travel in Scotland?", so I believe the omission of a mention of Scotland to be an oversight.
[2] <https://www.visitscotland.com/travel-planning/bus-coach>
Do not discount the many benefits, which might be difficult to quantify!
That sounds like a great story.
> Do not discount the many benefits, which might be difficult to quantify!
Yep! Anyone who thinks that a public transit company should make a monetary profit from rider fares is completely wrong. Public transit and public roads exist to facilitate happy lives as well as economic activity. If those things aren't included in your "are we making a profit?" analysis, then your analysis is just fucking wrong.
Every now and again, folks talk about making San Francisco's city transit system (MUNI) free of charge. The most frequent argument against that that I've heard is "but then the homeless will use the vehicles as mobile homeless shelters!"... which, like, there are ways to fix that, if you think it's a thing that needs fixing. As far as I know, MUNI has always required subsidies to operate, which -IMO- is how public transit should be run.
You may not like or disagree with it. But it's the true answer.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/finance-and-tax/making...
(Yes, I know UK isn’t in EU anymore but pretty sure their rule is legacy from EU)
This may be true, but State and Federal law prevail. In California, this [0] looks to be the relevant regulation:
1748.1. (a) No retailer in any sales, service, or lease transaction with a consumer may impose a surcharge on a cardholder who elects to use a credit card in lieu of payment by cash, check, or similar means. A retailer may, however, offer discounts for the purpose of inducing payment by cash, check, or other means not involving the use of a credit card, provided that the discount is offered to all prospective buyers.
[0] <https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-civ/division-3/...> The official place to find this would probably be [1] , but that's super down for me at the moment, so I link to something unofficial.
[1] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...>
Just life frequent insurance accidents, this raises overall costs. May be some other forces too of course
This has nothing to do with handling cash. It is to do with the elimination of paper tickets for monthly passes. Where I live you can pay cash for one off tickets, but they refuse to sell you paper monthly tickets.
Over here in Europa you get bombarded with the monthly/yearly subscription. And for companies it makes much more sense, regarding cashflow/projection etc.
A single ticket has to be printed and used in the space of a few hours. A monthly pass can be printed at any time and sold until the beginning of the month, for a much higher price. Much more risky for the transportation company.
Isnt it that ticket price should somehow decrease?
Ie. the end of the month November, not the end of December. I suppose you could also sell the remainder at a discount in December.
One bus company embedded the signing key for the ticket app in the app so that was not a good way of precenting fakes,
Much higher value train tickets are widely used in printed form and forgeries have not been a problem.
Really? From TFA:
When comparing the prices of First’s weekly bus pass in my area, which is available to purchase on the bus, and its monthly pass, which is exclusive to its app...
Also, having your entire economy depend on companies that are not under your control, and that are even actively being weaponised, that seems like a stupid thing to do.
Also, nothing in all of that precluded a web app.
It'll take a couple of years but people will figure it out eventually.
If legal tender is offered as a method of exchange then it should automatically be the best (least expensive).
Frankly, what's happened here is outrageous. By not legislating and outlawing this practice we've another instance of government ineptitude.
On top of that they'd need to pay their employees more and of course handling cash comes with security and, inevitably, enforcement. Additionally, you need people at every place where cash can be used as opposed to having almost all public transport stations unmanned like in Italy.
So let's say ~double that and round to 600 million to a billion GBP per year.
You can do some serious app development with that I would think. And because they don't pay the app store tax it's going to really be close to that amount.
Why shouldn't this (small) cost be mutualised? Why should everything be tuned and customised and priced to every single individual characteristics?
There's also operational cost to handling tons of different situations of people in every practical way of life.
EDIT: my point is that practicality is a clumsy way of disguising the fact that there is a objective, political choice behind it.
Making all the allowances for wheelchairs and the blind costs way more, yet you don't charge them more.
That is even if it were true enough to matter, which it's probably not, and there were no other ways to address it, which there absolutely are.
It's not the real reason but it probably is given as part of the excuse, while the real reason is either simple thoughtlessness, lack of consideration, developers doing whatever is easiest, and/or all the same reasons that cash is being gradually more and more disfavored across the board in all things. You can track and control people sooooo much better without anonymous offline cash.
Probably both. Some people involved are doing it for the first reason, and others are allowing it for the second reason. It's just super convenient synergy for everyone except the consumers.
Overhead handling cash is understandable, but otherwise the point makes no sense.
If you use an app, you probably have an account in some database someplace that holds your contact, billing, and balance information. That account has to be available online for the app on people's smartphones via API calls.
You also need a web portal: if someone loses/breaks their smartphone, and they need to re-install their app, they need to be able to login without the app to perhaps get their credentials again to attach to their app.
That backend has to be able to handle automated monthly payments, as well as manual top-ups via debit, and even cash for those not comfortable with giving payment information:
* https://www.gotransit.com/en/ways-to-pay/many-ways-to-pay-us...
The effort needed to be able to register/handle NFC cards is not much more than having to register/handle the NFC system on smartphone wallets:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_fare_collection
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calypso_(electronic_ticketing_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIPURSE
In many cases the cards came first and were later addable to various e-wallets:
It is a sensible fallback plan to keep the system functioning when the Magic Wand, inevitably, has its failure moment.
Affording users of public services a modicum of choice to avoid the Magic Wand is an important side effect.
Are there no passes? e.g. in Budapest I have a monthly public transport pass and I just board the vehicle when it arrives without having to validate or purchase a ticket every time.
Even better, in NRW region some ticket models are only available on the app, nowhere to be found on the ticket machines or at the counter on the stations.
The real issue is not smartphones, iOS and Android or apps. The issue is that independent technical standards are intentionally ignored. There is no reason that I should not be able to set my plan through curl and hand-draw the QR code with pen and paper. Sure, I would not want to actually do it like that, that's not the point. The point is: if I can use curl and pen & paper, then I can use whatever else I want. If I want to use a smartphone I should be able to code my own app according to a well-documented public API. Those APIs already do exist, otherwise the official app would not work, so it's no extra work for the service provider.
We need a law that mandates open specifications for access to all publicly available services.
So the providers want a live verification, not a static QR code that always remains valid for a month or so. My understanding that this is both, to combat fraud where fake tickets are sold (well, real ones but bought with fake or stolen payment methods) as well as people using tickets other than their own. The latter is theoretically prevented by checking photo ID, but almost nobody does that in practice.
So they force the app because it's slightly harder to fake than just copying the QR code. I don't think you'll get a more open system here unless the underlying vulnerabilities are fixed in some way. And you'd probably need to embed photo ID information in the ticket somehow to prevent multiple people from using a ticket, and I doubt that will happen for privacy reasons.
Obviously the flat rate doesn't work everywhere, but it absolutely sidesteps a bunch of issues.
It's a political choice whom to inflict operational burden or cost upon.
The equivalent in London is therefore the Older Persons' Freedom Pass, which I believe is free to apply for
The 60+ Card is therefore something most of the country doesn't benefit from from age 60, and the fee is perfectly reasonable
This is sidetracking anyway
HTLM5 and CSS3 completely remove the need to use a custom app.
All online services should just use a web site, accessible by any browsing device...
Maybe 10 years ago the whole project was stopped, sadly, and now we have the plague that requires everyone including handicapped people and seniors to use (often old and insecure) smartphones.
Had to install an app, create an account with the bus agency, give way too many of my personal details including address and phone number. Needed a smartphone, internet connection, German-compatible digital payment method (2 out 3 payment methods did not work).
This was a surreal experience. It literally took me about half an hour of struggling my way through a half-baked Germlish app to buy a single ticket, for a trip that I will probably make only once in my life. When the bus came, a very long line formed because, of course, most people assume you could just buy a ticket with the driver. I felt quite bad for this driver who probably had to deal with this every day. This particular bus only went once every two hours. It made me wonder whether any tourists had arrived there, waited 1½ hours for the bus, only to be rejected because they did not have a ticket and could not bribe the driver with physical euros. The airport apparently had no exchange offices.
Compare: when I took the bus in Montenegro, I gave the bus driver a 2 euro coin and stepped inside the bus and it went.
In most countries we had functional paper ticketing systems which were cheap, easy to understand and provided privacy. But they had to be replaced because . . . apps are cool???
Can anyone (Germans ?) confirm that this was, indeed, the only possible mechanism to pay for this single bus trip ?
I'm genuinely curious as my experiences in Switzerland - as late as last November - were that many different durations and service levels of paper ticket were able to be purchased, with cash or bank card, from a ticket machine.
Is the experience really that divergent in Germany ?
Ticket machines are still available, but only in highly populated areas or on locations like central (railway) stations. All others have been eliminated.
The app is called DB NRWay and has 1.6* on Google Play, so... See for yourself. I was surprised as well. Like I said: it was a surreal experience.
And yes: all bundesländer are _so_ different! NRW has another spiffy (creepy) app that uses geolocation from your phone to determine the amount of kilometers you have ridden on the bus, but it specifically only works within the bound of NRW.