Interesting. The article I linked to suggested that the general conditions for the City Ticket also apply with the BC100 (i.e. only for the destination city when travelling more than 100km).
The page you linked to also is a bit ambiguous about whether the BC100 follows those restrictions of the City Ticket or not. If what you say is true, that's pretty awesome.
Vancouver BC now has this. A standard ticket that works throughout the city on all transit. I hate it though because we used to run on a trust system with no barriers and now there is congestion at busy times due to the barriers. It also reportedly did not raise revenues much anyway.
The possibility to go long distance on trains meant for commuters is an unfortunate side effect of the ticket, more tolerated than intended.
The big improvement is that the ticket you buy for your home town now also works in cities you visit, no more figuring out a different byzantine price model each time you book a hotel.
Imagine vehicle tax would only permit to drive on the roads of your home town and going elsewhere would require you to register locally. Until yesterday, that was exactly how public transit worked.
It's the equivalent of the basic ticket in each city so guests, children, bike, dog, etc. will all vary based on whatever that offering is. Regardless it guarantees the purchaser transit. It's still massively simpler than actually buying a ticket in each city.
But does it matter, if you aren't in a hurry, and mobile? With this ticket you aren't bound to one specific train connection, can hop out anywhere and anytime it suits you, maybe leave your luggage in a lockerbox in station, and explore downtown, eat, relax in whatever lies between A -> B, probably multiple times, if you feel like it.
Interesting. I was under (perhaps mistakenly) the impression that buying a ticket to A-B-C and stopping at B, would result in being charged for the A-B route instead.
Regardless, I always check my baggage so A-B-C type tickets would not work for me.
You're correct, there are a bunch of different ticket options. Not sure about how it's actually implemented, though.
Slightly tangential, but when I was in Montreal, I was blown away that you just purchase a ticket from a machine and you get a printed out ticket with an NFC chip inside. Not my favourite part of the trip (Montreal is beautiful!) but definitely a cool piece of technology to see being put to such a mundane use.
How does the system know that the ticket was already used?
The thing with plane and long-distance train tickets is that you buy them for a specific route. So all the checking only needs to be done at your departure station/airport, the code for which is encoded in the ticket, and the rest of the system doesn't need to know anything about it. But you can't do that with city transport. When there aren't multi-use tickets, people would often buy multiple single-use ones at a time and use them as the need arises, without knowing in advance when, where, and from where they'll be going.
Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't know about that. My experience was like that: one day I could buy transport card by cash, the other day the driver informed that I cannot but tickets by cash anymore.
Very few people own a Bahncard 100. It's only useful if you need it for your job/business, otherwise it probably won't pay for itself. Most people prefer the car or plane (if you frequent between big cities) anyway
The system in London works well enough when you are staying in the city. But the gates are difficult to use if you are traveling with luggage. And I don't really like having to validate the ticket twice on each trip. I prefer a honor system where you can simply board the train without any additional hassle.
Definitely a high trust city (Vienna), but note that a few times a year they do check for tickets.
Because the monthly pass rate is so low, most people have purchased the pass on their phone and that must be shown a couple of times a year or else you’ll be charged a fine at the checkpoint. I’m actually surprised that the evasion stats are so low, since the fine isn’t terribly large and you might come out ahead just never paying the fare and only paying fines.
I have to say though, that system of spot checks makes the day to day very low friction.
This also somewhat prevent having unified ticketing systems like you have in Switzerland.
The ticket you can buy in the train station is also valid for the local buses. Or even better (from a practicality point of view), you can use an app that track your start and end point and automatically bill you accordingly (you rare have to stamp your ticket when using public transport; you just come and go and there's sometime controls by agents).
I'm sure that there's some exception in Japan, like JR West, Central and East are technically different companies but the tourist JR pass allows you to go wherever, but it's hard to beat the convenience of the Swiss transports.
The page you linked to also is a bit ambiguous about whether the BC100 follows those restrictions of the City Ticket or not. If what you say is true, that's pretty awesome.
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