Metro fare systems

[Joseph T]

How rare is London's system of pay-as-you-go among other city metro systems around the world? Whenever I look up how to use public transport outside in any other city, it almost always comes as a shock when said system requires buying a ticket as opposed to just using your debit/credit card to pay for your journey directly. How rare is it and why?

 

[dutchflyer]

Its new and hence not very widespread. As a very rough/broad rule such systems-and even more the many more urban BUS/TRam systems, keep on what they started with-many moons ago. PLUS that such systems also have to adapt to pax from nearly anywhere in the world-and banks are not that cooperative in that respect for what are considered to be tiny amounts (though the work they have to do is equal to pay 1, 11, 100 or 1111 local currency units).
And frankly: having grown up when buying a ticket was the normal way (and quite often even that was a mystery in to what/when/where) and still myself very much ´still´ using cash as a normal way for payment, this new facility only comes as a sometimes useful extra. I also follow various touristy forums and how to use local transit is quite often a major discussion point. Plus that the younger generation seems so much tied to their holy fones, that they are even unable to grasp how things once worked without such things.
You´ d better perhaps ask about what hard to grasp local ways of even getting such a ticket on paper can be found all over this world. Could show some quite weird ways!
Being NL=dutch myself: this country is busy setting up what is called OV-pay (OV=openbaar vervoer=public transit) to replace the decades old national chipcard (Like an oyster to load money or seasons on) with the bankcard. Works for now but only direct normal distance fares
BElgium has also made big steps in accepting bankcards for direct payment
DE=Germany is very much still married with using coins and paper money
The USA still has so often that flat fare/exact payment-possibly even only in coins
China-I guess for now the country with the most metro systems-and opening new ones every yr too, now mostly uses its own app-based systems that are of course always unable to work with the things of those nasty long-nosed foreigners.
Here in BKK the MRT (metro, there is also a semi-private BTS=skytrain, the oldest such system) has some gates that are adapted to also take cr/bankcards but in practice these only work with THAI issued ones. But a great many shops apply the same. Or IF foreign cards are taken, only from higher amounts.
Site for overview of all metro+tram systems: urbanrail.net.

 

[Bemined]

While the Netherlands is well on it's way to accepting bank cards, it's not always the cheapest option. In Rotterdam for long metro journeys it can be cheaper to buy a barcode ticket (which can be bought in the app) than to use pay-as-you-go. For trains it's even worse, specially during weekends. A month long weekend-free subscription can be cheaper than pay-as-you-go even for a single day. Without a price cap as in London, pay-as-you-can can easily become a tourist trap.

 

[johncrossley]

Obviously in many cities, the same ticketing system applies to all modes of public transport, including buses, and in many of these cities, you don't need to present a ticket when boarding the bus or before getting on a metro train. Therefore there is no pressing need to accept bank cards in order to speed up boarding times. Whereas the London Underground has ticket gates and it was necessary to implement contactless bank cards in order to remove driver payment from buses.

In many cities, monthly and yearly tickets are often very cheap and people who travel less often can typically get a bundle of tickets for a heavily discounted price. So only very infrequent travellers, such as tourists, will need a regular ticket and a lot of them are happy to use mobile apps.

 

[Austriantrain]

Obviously in many cities, the same ticketing system applies to all modes of public transport, including buses, and in many of these cities, you don't need to present a ticket when boarding the bus or before getting on a metro train. Therefore there is no pressing need to accept bank cards in order to speed up boarding times. Whereas the London Underground has ticket gates and it was necessary to implement contactless bank cards in order to remove driver payment from buses.

In many cities, monthly and yearly tickets are often very cheap and people who travel less often can typically get a bundle of tickets for a heavily discounted price. So only very infrequent travellers, such as tourists, will need a regular ticket and a lot of them are happy to use mobile apps.

Exactly. See Vienna for instance. The underground is not gated since most people have season tickets, and all tickets are valid for all modes of transport. There are rover passes for tourists and buying single tickets really is the exception. If you need one, it is easily bought online.

 

[nwales58]

How rare is London's system of pay-as-you-go ... and why?

Which of the two systems is rare?

Oyster PAYG is about 25 years old. In transport payment smart card terms that's near-prehistoric. I think only Seoul and Hong Kong predated it and I think those were much simpler. Others will correct me if I'm wrong. MiFare Classic cards were state of the art at the time.

EMV contactless PAYG is not rare nowadays, although implementations vary enormously.

Technical constraints of London Underground barriers are rare. For instance:
1) Oyster was required to have very short processing times (can't remember but maybe 100-300ms) so that the flow rate of a barrier was no worse than a magstripe ticket because many stations had no spare room. A query to a central system (normal now) was undesirable due to latency and data link reliability. So Oyster had to be processed at the station and in the barrier as far as possible.
2) Privacy was taken far more seriously than nowadays and there was probably less fraud. Your last few journeys were stored on the card only. Central storage was needed for capping calculations but probably came in ages before that.

Whenever I look up how to use public transport outside in any other city, it almost always comes as a shock when said system requires buying a ticket ... How rare is it and why?

TfL requires a ticket for some special cases, railcard-discounted off-peak zones 1-6 for instance. So do some other systems, typically pre-purchasing a multiple zone or multi-person day ticket on an app or at a ticket machine.

Indeed, in a typical german system contactless operation on board is usually to buy a ticket, not tap in/tap out. Systems such as eezy.nrw exist but are not the universal system that OVpay is in the Netherlands.

Eastern Europe is more modern in the larger cities. E.g. Bucharest has contactless tap-in, Sibiu you buy a ticket from a machine using contactless but in Craiova you still need a physical ticket bought at a traditional ticket office or convenience shop, from memory.

So I'm not sure what is rare.

 

[ClivePage]

Recent experience is that bank cards from the UK work fine contactlessly on the Rome Metro and buses. A pair of bus inspectors boarded a bus and checked all tickets - my card was checked and it took maybe 10 seconds to be approved - I think it must have checked back to the operator's database to do that. But contactless cards are supposed to work on the Leornardo "express" between Termini and Fiumicino Airport but they didn't - had to buy tickets each way.
In Naples UK bank card works contactlessly on the Circumvesuviana line, but where there was a gateline you had to find the one or two gates which accepted cards, or where there were no gates find a machine on the wall of the ticket hall (two of them usually one for Tap In one for Tap Out, marked in English). Bank cards are supposed to work on the Naples Metro but I didn't try as they do not work on the buses; we bought day travelcards which covers both and the funiculars for under 6 Euros.

 

[canary fan]

Recent experience is that bank cards from the UK work fine contactlessly on the Rome Metro and buses. A pair of bus inspectors boarded a bus and checked all tickets - my card was checked and it took maybe 10 seconds to be approved - I think it must have checked back to the operator's database to do that. But contactless cards are supposed to work on the Leornardo "express" between Termini and Fiumicino Airport but they didn't - had to buy tickets each way.
In Naples UK bank card works contactlessly on the Circumvesuviana line, but where there was a gateline you had to find the one or two gates which accepted cards, or where there were no gates find a machine on the wall of the ticket hall (two of them usually one for Tap In one for Tap Out, marked in English). Bank cards are supposed to work on the Naples Metro but I didn't try as they do not work on the buses; we bought day travelcards which covers both and the funiculars for under 6 Euros.

Contactless cards work perfectly in Brussels on the metro, tram and bus. They also work on buses in the Flemish speaking region-one single price per journey in this case, no matter the distance.

 

[kirk781]

In Indian subway/metro systems, one can either buy a token beforehand for whichever station they want to go or use a metro pass to travel to any destination freely on the line. It will auto debit after the journey ends when you exit.

There is also a concept called suburban railways in India where people often make monthly passes [usually in few big cities] but that is for a fixed price and can be used for unlimited journeys, I think. Either case, traditional Indian train stations and modern metro stations are a league apart even in the same country.

 

[blotred]

So with PAYG but using a proprietary stored-value card (eg like the London Oyster card), it's quite common in quite a few places... the faff is getting hold of said card.
Though you can now add the card to your Apple Pay / Google Pay so it sits alongside your credit cards.

For example:
- Japan: Across the country, there are so-called "IC Cards" which are mostly compatible with each other. In the Tokyo Area, they have PASMO or Suica, but it is compatible in other regions (eg ICOCA in JR West). Due to chip shortages getting a new physical card isn't easy, but you can add it and load it via Apple Pay or equivalent.
Then you use it on a PAYG basis on supported transport which is a lot.

- US Bay Area: They have the Clipper Card which operates in a similar PAYG way on BART and CalTrain, also supports Apple Pay etc
There is also something similar I think in Hong Kong (Octopus), Toronto (Presto) and others.
NYC's MTA also had the Metrocard which was similar but used a magnetic swipe, so no option for adding it to Apple Pay (though Metrocard has a replacement, below)

In terms of ones which accept Contactless Bank Card, Milan and Barcelona seemed to support just tapping your card upon boarding (it was slower than TfL's implementation, but fine still).
New York City's MTA also has licensed TfLs implementation for bank card contactless (which they call OMNY) which can be used across a lot of NYC.

In Switzerland there is a unique concept where you use your phone to check-in and check-out at the start and end of the journey, and it uses your GPS to determine your route and optimal fare (taking into account day passes) at the end of the day. Fairtiq / SBB EasyRide are examples of this in Switzerland, but it can be a battery killer. And I have sometimes forgotten to check-out which can result in some faff.

 

[Beebman]

I visited Sofia in Bulgaria back in September and I had no problems with the Metro barriers accepting my UK bank card as contactless payment.

 

[sheff1]

UK bankcard works fine on the Singapore Metro.

 

[nwales58]

In Switzerland there is a unique concept where you use your phone to check-in and check-out at the start and end of the journey ...

but not unique. Also eezy.nrw, priced using crow-fly distances. Probably others too though I've no idea whether any have massive uptake.

 

[cool110]

Japan: Across the country, there are so-called "IC Cards" which are mostly compatible with each other. In the Tokyo Area, they have PASMO or Suica, but it is compatible in other regions (eg ICOCA in JR West). Due to chip shortages getting a new physical card isn't easy, but you can add it and load it via Apple Pay or equivalent.

Slight caveat with that is that those cards use FeliCa rather than the ISO/IEC 14443 standard used everywhere else, which most non-Japanese devices don't support (Apple being the main exception).

 

[rvdborgt]

but not unique. Also eezy.nrw, priced using crow-fly distances. Probably others too though I've no idea whether any have massive uptake.

Used this in Vorarlberg last year. There are more regions where it's available.

 

[nwales58]

Used this in Vorarlberg last year. There are more regions where it's available.

Very interesting indeed. So Fairtiq are quite widespread, a mixture of german Verkehrsverbund and some entire states, a couple of regions in France and provinces in Austria.

Do they dominate location-based ticketing currently or are there others?

 

[explnemeses]

How rare is it and why?

From what I've heard from some locals from Prague, the season tickets are so cheap that they are the obvious choice if you live there. For example a year ticket for an adult on all modes within city limits is 3650czk, which is the equivalent of 10czk, or 33p, per day. When you consider that the price for a 30-minute single is 3x that, increasing to 4x for a 90-minute one, you can see that even if you only make a single 30 min trip once every 3 days, it wouldn't cost you any more to get a year pass, which would additionally save you a lot of time buying tickets.

Source: https://pid.cz/en/tickets-and-fare/#prague

 

[dutchflyer]

1.Very interesting indeed. So Fairtiq are quite widespread, a mixture of german Verkehrsverbund and some entire states, a couple of regions in France and provinces in Austria.
2.Do they dominate location-based ticketing currently or are there others?

@1. In AT=Austria the regions (´Laender´) work effectively as german-style ´Verkehrsverbund´. Also note that the mentioned eezy works for all-NRW-a major state in DE=Germany, holding several Verbünde and also allowing trips across Verbund-Borders. Also most of CZ=Czechia and in lesser amount/not universal also in PL=Poland and SK=Slovakia plus the odd FRench region/departement the regions work/organise their transit on a Verkehrsverbund method.
@2.no, from what I´ve seen/read about it/noted these new types of ticketing are not wide-spread-sometimes to the extent that one is already talking about withdrawing them-to minimise the excessive amounts to be spend on IT and perhaps also ground-based machines/receivers or whatever to registrate it all or even training for ticketing-inspectors. And f.e. DE=Germany: that now 58€/month DE-ticket, nation-wide, ALL local transit, is so cheap (less as 2€/day=even less as a tipical urban single) that all those other fancy systems for perhaps the odd app-married foreign tourist are more+more seen as superfluous. It does remain a dilemma without an all-compassing answer. As mentioned several times above-with examples, about anywhere monthly or yearly seasons are the norm for the regular traveller. It has myself always a bit surprised how little their take-up used to be in GB/UK-though I also assume you are more knowledgeable about that as I am on the continent.
BTW: on the 10.000+ citybuses here in BKK/TH -these all still run with roving conductors (very often married couples work on the same bus: man drives, woman collects-making for easy shifts), taking cash only, only taking also THai ID-cards for any discount (seniors from 60 and schoolpupils in uniform should get half fare) and also need to know the distance based fare tables for AC-buses-but in the newest latest batch of CN-built blue electric buses are now tap IN+OUT validators-work of course only with THai cards-as a prelude to what is potentially a change-over to OMO- or OPO in the -very- long run.

 

[explnemeses]

surprised how little their take-up used to be in GB/UK-though

Well in London for example, month/year tickets are separate for bus and trams vs other forms of rail (since in the UK we love to charge you differently depending on the mode), and even for just that, you pay £988/yr. That's equivalent to £2.71/day. When you consider that a single is £1.75, you can see why people don't buy long term tickets. Not only because of lack of savings, but also that it doesn't cover the Tube, DLR, London Overground, Elizabeth line, River Bus or National Rail services.

Meanwhile, a year ticket for the Tube, DLR, Elizabeth line, London Overground, and National Rail services costs a staggering £3,120/yr for zones 1-6 (what most people will consider London), or £8.55/day. As a single from zone 1 to zone 6 would cost you £3.60 off-peak (£5.60 peak), you can see this is even worse value for money than the bus pass.

 

[mad_rich]

"It's easy, just use contactless" is something I often hear, but it's not always easy to know how they expect you to use contactless in that city.

In London, you tap on to a bus, but not off. In Amsterdam, you must tap also off a bus/ tram, because the fares are zonal - and if you don't tap off you'll get max fared. In Brno, you don't have to tap off, but it might get you a cheaper fare if you've made a short journey (like the German Kurzstrecke). In Prague, you choose a 30 or 90 minute ticket from the machine on the tram, then tap your card.

On a metro, it's easy when there are gates. Tap on the way in. To exit, there may be card readers (London) or no readers, just push the turnstile (Rome). Or certain gates you must find (Brussels). But when there are no barriers at all (Brescia) I was left trying to guess whether I was supposed to tap out for the correct fare, or whether it was single fare, and tapping again would charge me twice.

And don't even start me on whether you can share a contactless card with others in your party (OK in New York, for example).

Good luck guessing what to do for a second bus/ tram. Was your ticket a timed ticket so you don't need to tap again? Or a timed ticket where you need to tap again but won't get charged? Or something else?

You could spend two hours in each city trying to decipher the local transport authority's website in each city, and be none the wiser.

Even in my own city (Newcastle) I don't fully know how the buses work! Some have card readers you can tap on and (optionally?) off, but only some operators and some journeys. So I end up buying a ticket from the driver.

 

[DanielB]

In Amsterdam, you must tap also off a bus/ tram, because the fares are zonal - and if you don't tap off you'll get max fared.

Not zonal, for PAYG at least, but distance based. Not tapping off leads to € 4 being charged and not the maximum fare on that specific bus. There are some cases however where not tapping off is cheaper as the trip costs more than the base fare of € 4.
That's also why on some longer routes the base fare is € 8 or even € 10 to encourage tapping off, avoiding loss of revenue for the operator. (And forgetting to tap off more than 12 times in 6 months will result in a blocked card).

 

[nwales58]

In Amsterdam, you must tap also off a bus/ tram, because the fares are zonal - and if you don't tap off you'll get max fared. In Brno, you don't have to tap off, but it might get you a cheaper fare if you've made a short journey (like the German Kurzstrecke). In Prague, you choose a 30 or 90 minute ticket from the machine on the tram, then tap your card.

From memory, if you tap a second time after boarding in Brno? Bucurest? it shows whether your first tap was successful (in case you don't know how many green lights you should wait for) and offers options for paying for another person or a longer distance; elsewhere a second tap charges a second person immediately or not at all.

It takes as long reading web sites to work out how to use contactless as it does to understand each ticketing system.

Venice/Mestre, presumably elsewhere, have conventional yellow scanners and new blue scanners. Contactless is easy but on blue scanners if you have an Aztec code ticket you must press a button on the scanner before you put a phone near otherwise it charges contactless.

Ticket apps are easier. Maybe. A new one for each city or region (OK, some exceptions). Often your virtual ticket is valid from time of issue and the app shows an Aztec or QR code which you scan at the barrier or on the vehicle. BUT in some places (e.g. Italy) your ticket in the app is like a paper ticket and so you must scan a QR code to validate it, hunting around the stop, inside the vehicle by the driver, opposite the driver, by the back door or whever to find the QR code sticker.

 

[styles]

I'd be interested to know how some countries process card payments for such transport. In the UK, and much of Europe, we use 'dual messaging' for card payments - an authentication message ("Should we approve this payment?") is separate from the clearing message ("You need to pay this money now."). When you tap in to LU, the auth message is offline, meaning your card issuer isn't contacted at the moment you tap your card, else this would slow down opening the barriers while the authentication message goes through. It does catch up fairly quickly in the background though.

In countries who operate single message card payments, do they also support offline transactions?

I know Mastercard/VISA have always been funny about offline transactions (rightly so, as you could be going into unauthorised overdrafts etc), but presumably the likes of JCB, BC Card, etc are more accepting of it on transport networks as they're also dealing with London-style volumes of customers going through barriers (if not more).