6 ms·

Came back from Berlin to NYC. In Berlin there was no gates. You just walk to the train. You were suppose to buy the ticket and show it if they ask for it. Even

by msoad 4y ago

Came back from Berlin to NYC. In Berlin there was no gates. You just walk to the train. You were suppose to buy the ticket and show it if they ask for it. Even that is unnecessary in the US. The best payment system for public transportation is no payment. In the US it doesn't cover much of the fare anyways but has so much overhead for the MTA. People who try to dodge the fare are actually poor and the most deserving of not paying anyways.

bergenty 4y ago
What nonsense. I was in Berlin last month, the ticket buying experience is abysmal. The machines don’t work. Sometime (don’t know when) you can only buy tickets on the train since they don’t have ticket machines at every station. When you do try to use the machines it’s some ridiculous combination of zones and unspellable names you have to type out to get your ticket that isn’t intuitive at all. In NYC, buy ticket on machine -> works for one trip wherever you’re going in the city. Outside the city? Just talk to the person at the ticket window and they tell you what to get.
- msoad 4y ago
  The 9 Euro ticket was super easy to buy for me. I bought it in the airport. Not sure why it was so hard for you. I don't speak a single word of German either.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Isn’t that like a limited time thing? Try starting at a random station and navigating from there. I was at seegersfeld trying to get into Berlin and it was ridiculous. Also getting back there at the end of the night. It also had nothing to do with speaking german, everyone I spoke to in Germany seemed to somehow know English.
    - Lacerda69 4y ago
      You are correct, it was limited thing from july to august this summer. unfortunately it's over now. it had a lot of benefits, making public transport really easy for everyone was just one. it also saved a ton of co2 and enabled a lot of people to travel around the country, who werent able otherwise. RIP 9€ ticket, you will be sorely missed:/
  - ThePadawan 4y ago
    German here: The 9 Euro ticket is a brilliant innovation compared to what came before and is now coming back after it: Extremely complicated fare zone issues. I'm not trying to be rude, just trying to clarify: Saying that the 9 Euro ticket is easy to buy is like saying a 20 hour flight is comfortable, because you flew Emirates First Class.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  In the spring, at a station within Berlin's public transport zone, I found that pressing the British flag for English removed the local transport options (zone A+B, zone A+B+C etc) from the screen. It left me only with the option to buy a point-to-point train ticket. It was simple without changing the interface to English.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    I changed it to English as well but still got all the zoning options.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Pacific Northwest region of the US uses that honor system on public transit
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The version of the honor system where somebody asks to see your ticket once every 10-20 rides. When I lived in Portland, I was never brave enough to get on without a ticket, because I didn't want to have to pay a way bigger ticket. That system is an outlier to the total control and surveillance that is the modern expectation/demand.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The San Diego checks were so cursory as to be a formality - I never did but I’m sure you could have rode for decades on a single ticket because the coo never got close enough to see times and dates. Now it’s all cards and stuff so I’m not sure how they police it.
randomopining 4y ago
Berlin sucks. A bit confusing and then they pay guys to walk around and check for tickets.
- Lacerda69 4y ago
  If you know what to look for you can always spot the controllers, so they are easy to avoid. not easy for foereigners of course, but honestly as tourist most public transport anywhere is confusing if you're not used to it.
  - knorker 4y ago
    I found the controllers easy to spot as a foreigner; they look like hardened police officers who will not take your shit if you don't have a ticket. That's my experience, at least. When I was young and poor I "saved money" by buying the ticket in the morning, and only stamping it on the way back in the evening. I gambled successfully that if you get caught in the morning then you are the foreigner who does have a ticket (time of purchase is on the ticket) but "was not aware" that you had to stamp it.
    - Lacerda69 4y ago
      Yea that is mostly right IMO. Sometimes (rarely) they will be "undercover" and wear plainclothes - you can usually spot them on the oversized handbags they carry where they store their scanning devices. Some are really good, very hard to spot them. But they always come in groups of 2+ and will enter at different doors and make eye contact with each other before they start controlling. And yea the "clueless tourist" approach works almost always.
wan23 4y ago
38% of the MTA's operating budget comes from train and bus fares. As much as it would be nice if it were free, the money needs to come from somewhere.
- cagenut 4y ago
  in order to reverse the incentives that brought us the current system design, the net of road-taxes/tolls vs public-transit-fares should be re-balanced until transit is free and driving has incremental costs, as opposed to the current effective inverse.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  They get billions of the federal and state governments - I’ve always wondered why the federal government pours so much money into a transit system that such a small percentage of the country uses.
  - eclipticplane 4y ago
    Would they not also pour billions into transit if everyone in NYC lived in smaller, rural towns? Just a spot check, but Montana received $491 million in 2020 (https://leg.mt.gov/content/Publications/fiscal/leg_reference/Brochures/Highway-Funding-2020.pdf https://leg.mt.gov/content/Publications/fiscal/leg_reference...) and has a population of ~1 million. NYC has ~8 million, ~20 million in the greater metro region.
  - derefr 4y ago
    The alternative is pouring the money into more highway spending for those same people. (Yes, despite highways being state-run infrastructure projects, the federal government mostly pays for them — this is why they're able to enforce uniform standards for road design + signage + etc.)
- presentation 4y ago
  Do what Japan does, the railways are private real estate companies that run giant shopping/apartment/office complexes on top of the stations. They’re super rich. They’re regulated so they have to provide service to unprofitable areas and use standardized infrastructure. It is glorious.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
This is how it used to (and in many places still does) work all over Europe, but I imagine fare gates are much cheaper than controllers. The German-speaking countries seem to be a (pretty big) exception to this rule; I wonder if there’s some cultural resistance against electronic ticketing? After all, Germany is also still very cash-oriented (at least before the pandemic).
- derefr 4y ago
  Cultural resistance to being tracked (for, um, obvious reasons.) Germany hasn't run a census since 1987.
  - pvg 4y ago
    Germany has address registration so I don't think that's the reason.
  - Tomte 4y ago
    We had one in 2011. next one is this year.
    - derefr 4y ago
      That was an EU census, not a German census. Top-down multilateral peer pressure. Germany hasn't decided on its own to do a census since 1987.
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Yeah it's called proof-of-payment and it's starting to become more common in the US. In San Francisco all of Muni is POP, it speeds up boarding dramatically. As for electronic ticketing, dunno how much it's caught on in Germany but BVG in Berlin has a mobile app that you can buy tickets with. Worked well enough for me.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  > I imagine fare gates are much cheaper than controllers. German living in Switzerland here: What's even more expensive is delays. It's unthinkable to me how to build a high throughput station with ticket gates. And that's not even considering the need for additional fire egresses etc. involved. Switzerland is a bit more paper-averse than Germany. 80% of people on the train hold up a QR code on their phone for the employee to scan once aboard, 10% hold up their (credit card sized) travel card for them to RFID scan, and the remaining 10% have a paper ticket.
squeaky-clean 4y ago
The "Select Busses" in NYC work like this. They're express, medium distance, bus lines that take a separate ticket than the standard MTA busses. To keep them express, they don't scan your ticket on entry. But every 1/10 busses has an MTA officer who inspects for tickets. I think the government does subsidize the fare quite a bit. $2.75 will get you from any station in the 5 Burroughs to any other station. I don't know another metro transit system as cheap.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  €1,15 gets you from any station in the Barcelona metro area to any other, using any mode of public transport and even a combination thereof. Metro, bus, tram, even trains. You have 1h15m to complete the trip. It's a really great deal IMO. But of course the cost of living is much lower here so it's comparable you that $2.75 in NYC.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    Honestly didn't know about the Barcelona system, that is cheaper. Looks like a good network too.
monksy 4y ago
Germany does not play around with fare evaders. The checkers will enter the train and check your validated ticket. If you do not pay they will fine you on the spot and if you do not pay you do risk going to jail. Transit is expensive, claiming people have a right to free transit is just idiotic on so many levels.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > Transit is expensive, claiming people have a right to free transit is just idiotic on so many levels. It doesn't matter how expensive transit is, if the total costs of fare collection & enforcement is greater than what they collect they're better off making it free and potentially making up the small shortfall with extra taxes. Considering a lot of these systems will be built by large consultancies specialized in milking out government contracts while delivering shoddy work, I wouldn't be surprised if fare collection was actually way more expensive that it needs to be.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Germany does not play around with fare evaders. The checkers will enter the train and check your validated ticket. If you do not pay they will fine you on the spot Houston, Texas is like that. I got checked four times in three days. I saw non-paying people get fined on the spot. From what I could hear, it was $75.
- danielfoster 4y ago
  Without taking a side here, remember that education and police protection are also expensive. Few would agree to the phrase, “Education is expensive, so claiming so many children have a right to free education is idiotic on so many levels.” Transit is very expensive and the cost / benefit needs to be decided by the public. Governments also need a plan to pay for it. But I would not say it is idiotic just because it is expensive.
  - mpalmer 4y ago
    The difference is that education and policing are not on-demand services, at least not in the way transit is. I can ride the bus as many times as I like, and that creates costs for the system. There's no direct relationship between user whim and system costs for the other two services.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
I was visiting Hamburg ~30 years ago - spoke no German. Bought a ticket from a machine and boarded the train. A couple of stops later some heavily armed police were checking tickets on the train and I found out the hard way that I had purchased a 2nd class ticket but I was sitting in 1st class. Luckily once they saw my US passport they forgave my ignorance and ushered me along without a citation (or something worse).
larusso 4y ago
The big reason why in this case the city of Berlin never added gates is a architectural reason. At least that’s what they claimed. Most U-Bahn stations don’t have a mid platform layer. They run directly under the road. You can’t create a universal system. If this argument is bullshit I’m not sure but it is what it is. But to the walking in part. You are only allowed on the platform with a valid ticket. Controllers can check for tickets outside of the trains but nobody normally does anyways. To the free public transportation part. Germany has a surge in this topic with the short introduction of the 9€ ticket. A ticket that costs 9€ a month and allows German wide travel (limited to specific trains). The politicians hit a political honeypot with this idea. A lot of Germans want the continuation of this ticket even though it is questionable that it actually pays out.

by msoad 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

What nonsense. I was in Berlin last month, the ticket buying experience is abysmal. The machines don’t work. Sometime (don’t know when) you can only buy tickets on the train since they don’t have ticket machines at every station. When you do try to use the machines it’s some ridiculous combination of zones and unspellable names you have to type out to get your ticket that isn’t intuitive at all. In NYC, buy ticket on machine -> works for one trip wherever you’re going in the city. Outside the city? Just talk to the person at the ticket window and they tell you what to get.

msoad 4y ago
The 9 Euro ticket was super easy to buy for me. I bought it in the airport. Not sure why it was so hard for you. I don't speak a single word of German either.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Isn’t that like a limited time thing? Try starting at a random station and navigating from there. I was at seegersfeld trying to get into Berlin and it was ridiculous. Also getting back there at the end of the night. It also had nothing to do with speaking german, everyone I spoke to in Germany seemed to somehow know English.
  - Lacerda69 4y ago
    You are correct, it was limited thing from july to august this summer. unfortunately it's over now. it had a lot of benefits, making public transport really easy for everyone was just one. it also saved a ton of co2 and enabled a lot of people to travel around the country, who werent able otherwise. RIP 9€ ticket, you will be sorely missed:/
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  German here: The 9 Euro ticket is a brilliant innovation compared to what came before and is now coming back after it: Extremely complicated fare zone issues. I'm not trying to be rude, just trying to clarify: Saying that the 9 Euro ticket is easy to buy is like saying a 20 hour flight is comfortable, because you flew Emirates First Class.
Symbiote 4y ago
In the spring, at a station within Berlin's public transport zone, I found that pressing the British flag for English removed the local transport options (zone A+B, zone A+B+C etc) from the screen. It left me only with the option to buy a point-to-point train ticket. It was simple without changing the interface to English.
- bergenty 4y ago
  I changed it to English as well but still got all the zoning options.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Pacific Northwest region of the US uses that honor system on public transit

pessimizer 4y ago
The version of the honor system where somebody asks to see your ticket once every 10-20 rides. When I lived in Portland, I was never brave enough to get on without a ticket, because I didn't want to have to pay a way bigger ticket. That system is an outlier to the total control and surveillance that is the modern expectation/demand.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The San Diego checks were so cursory as to be a formality - I never did but I’m sure you could have rode for decades on a single ticket because the coo never got close enough to see times and dates. Now it’s all cards and stuff so I’m not sure how they police it.

randomopining 4y ago

Berlin sucks. A bit confusing and then they pay guys to walk around and check for tickets.

Lacerda69 4y ago
If you know what to look for you can always spot the controllers, so they are easy to avoid. not easy for foereigners of course, but honestly as tourist most public transport anywhere is confusing if you're not used to it.
- knorker 4y ago
  I found the controllers easy to spot as a foreigner; they look like hardened police officers who will not take your shit if you don't have a ticket. That's my experience, at least. When I was young and poor I "saved money" by buying the ticket in the morning, and only stamping it on the way back in the evening. I gambled successfully that if you get caught in the morning then you are the foreigner who does have a ticket (time of purchase is on the ticket) but "was not aware" that you had to stamp it.
  - Lacerda69 4y ago
    Yea that is mostly right IMO. Sometimes (rarely) they will be "undercover" and wear plainclothes - you can usually spot them on the oversized handbags they carry where they store their scanning devices. Some are really good, very hard to spot them. But they always come in groups of 2+ and will enter at different doors and make eye contact with each other before they start controlling. And yea the "clueless tourist" approach works almost always.

wan23 4y ago

38% of the MTA's operating budget comes from train and bus fares. As much as it would be nice if it were free, the money needs to come from somewhere.

cagenut 4y ago
in order to reverse the incentives that brought us the current system design, the net of road-taxes/tolls vs public-transit-fares should be re-balanced until transit is free and driving has incremental costs, as opposed to the current effective inverse.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
They get billions of the federal and state governments - I’ve always wondered why the federal government pours so much money into a transit system that such a small percentage of the country uses.
- eclipticplane 4y ago
  Would they not also pour billions into transit if everyone in NYC lived in smaller, rural towns? Just a spot check, but Montana received $491 million in 2020 (https://leg.mt.gov/content/Publications/fiscal/leg_reference/Brochures/Highway-Funding-2020.pdf https://leg.mt.gov/content/Publications/fiscal/leg_reference...) and has a population of ~1 million. NYC has ~8 million, ~20 million in the greater metro region.
- derefr 4y ago
  The alternative is pouring the money into more highway spending for those same people. (Yes, despite highways being state-run infrastructure projects, the federal government mostly pays for them — this is why they're able to enforce uniform standards for road design + signage + etc.)
presentation 4y ago
Do what Japan does, the railways are private real estate companies that run giant shopping/apartment/office complexes on top of the stations. They’re super rich. They’re regulated so they have to provide service to unprofitable areas and use standardized infrastructure. It is glorious.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago

This is how it used to (and in many places still does) work all over Europe, but I imagine fare gates are much cheaper than controllers. The German-speaking countries seem to be a (pretty big) exception to this rule; I wonder if there’s some cultural resistance against electronic ticketing? After all, Germany is also still very cash-oriented (at least before the pandemic).

derefr 4y ago
Cultural resistance to being tracked (for, um, obvious reasons.) Germany hasn't run a census since 1987.
- pvg 4y ago
  Germany has address registration so I don't think that's the reason.
- Tomte 4y ago
  We had one in 2011. next one is this year.
  - derefr 4y ago
    That was an EU census, not a German census. Top-down multilateral peer pressure. Germany hasn't decided on its own to do a census since 1987.
inferiorhuman 4y ago
Yeah it's called proof-of-payment and it's starting to become more common in the US. In San Francisco all of Muni is POP, it speeds up boarding dramatically. As for electronic ticketing, dunno how much it's caught on in Germany but BVG in Berlin has a mobile app that you can buy tickets with. Worked well enough for me.
ThePadawan 4y ago
> I imagine fare gates are much cheaper than controllers. German living in Switzerland here: What's even more expensive is delays. It's unthinkable to me how to build a high throughput station with ticket gates. And that's not even considering the need for additional fire egresses etc. involved. Switzerland is a bit more paper-averse than Germany. 80% of people on the train hold up a QR code on their phone for the employee to scan once aboard, 10% hold up their (credit card sized) travel card for them to RFID scan, and the remaining 10% have a paper ticket.

squeaky-clean 4y ago

The "Select Busses" in NYC work like this. They're express, medium distance, bus lines that take a separate ticket than the standard MTA busses. To keep them express, they don't scan your ticket on entry. But every 1/10 busses has an MTA officer who inspects for tickets. I think the government does subsidize the fare quite a bit. $2.75 will get you from any station in the 5 Burroughs to any other station. I don't know another metro transit system as cheap.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
€1,15 gets you from any station in the Barcelona metro area to any other, using any mode of public transport and even a combination thereof. Metro, bus, tram, even trains. You have 1h15m to complete the trip. It's a really great deal IMO. But of course the cost of living is much lower here so it's comparable you that $2.75 in NYC.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Honestly didn't know about the Barcelona system, that is cheaper. Looks like a good network too.

monksy 4y ago

Germany does not play around with fare evaders. The checkers will enter the train and check your validated ticket. If you do not pay they will fine you on the spot and if you do not pay you do risk going to jail. Transit is expensive, claiming people have a right to free transit is just idiotic on so many levels.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> Transit is expensive, claiming people have a right to free transit is just idiotic on so many levels. It doesn't matter how expensive transit is, if the total costs of fare collection & enforcement is greater than what they collect they're better off making it free and potentially making up the small shortfall with extra taxes. Considering a lot of these systems will be built by large consultancies specialized in milking out government contracts while delivering shoddy work, I wouldn't be surprised if fare collection was actually way more expensive that it needs to be.
reaperducer 4y ago
Germany does not play around with fare evaders. The checkers will enter the train and check your validated ticket. If you do not pay they will fine you on the spot Houston, Texas is like that. I got checked four times in three days. I saw non-paying people get fined on the spot. From what I could hear, it was $75.
danielfoster 4y ago
Without taking a side here, remember that education and police protection are also expensive. Few would agree to the phrase, “Education is expensive, so claiming so many children have a right to free education is idiotic on so many levels.” Transit is very expensive and the cost / benefit needs to be decided by the public. Governments also need a plan to pay for it. But I would not say it is idiotic just because it is expensive.
- mpalmer 4y ago
  The difference is that education and policing are not on-demand services, at least not in the way transit is. I can ride the bus as many times as I like, and that creates costs for the system. There's no direct relationship between user whim and system costs for the other two services.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

I was visiting Hamburg ~30 years ago - spoke no German. Bought a ticket from a machine and boarded the train. A couple of stops later some heavily armed police were checking tickets on the train and I found out the hard way that I had purchased a 2nd class ticket but I was sitting in 1st class. Luckily once they saw my US passport they forgave my ignorance and ushered me along without a citation (or something worse).

larusso 4y ago

The big reason why in this case the city of Berlin never added gates is a architectural reason. At least that’s what they claimed. Most U-Bahn stations don’t have a mid platform layer. They run directly under the road. You can’t create a universal system. If this argument is bullshit I’m not sure but it is what it is. But to the walking in part. You are only allowed on the platform with a valid ticket. Controllers can check for tickets outside of the trains but nobody normally does anyways. To the free public transportation part. Germany has a surge in this topic with the short introduction of the 9€ ticket. A ticket that costs 9€ a month and allows German wide travel (limited to specific trains). The politicians hit a political honeypot with this idea. A lot of Germans want the continuation of this ticket even though it is questionable that it actually pays out.