Fare Practices
Here’s a table of urban public transport fares for various cities, covering the United States, Canada, parts of Europe, Turkey, and Japan. Included are single fares, multi-ride discounts, day passes, weeklies, and monthlies, with the last three shown with their ratios to single fares. As far as possible we’ve tried doing fares as of 2026, but it’s possible a few numbers are not updated and depict 2025 figures.
The thing to note is that in Continental Europe, there are steeply discounted monthlies – only two cities in the table charge for a monthly more than for 30 single-trips (Paris at 35.5, Bari at 35). Most Italian cities cluster around 20, and Barcelona, Lisbon, and especially Porto are even lower. Berlin used to have a multiplier of 32 before the 9€ monthly and the subsequent Deutschlandticket but the current multiplier is 15.75 within the city. Stockholm has a monthly multiplier of 24.7. Prague’s multiplier is 12.
Japanese monthly fares are strange by Western standards, in the sense that they are station-to-station, with subsegments allowed but no trips outside the segment; subject to this constraint the multiplier is 30-40, with small additional discount for buying 3-6 months in advance, but the unrestricted monthly fare is very high. London and Istanbul functionally do not have monthlies, in the sense that the multiplier is so high (78.5 Istanbul-wide, and it’s not truly unlimited but is capped at 180 trips/month) that except for trips within Central London it might as well not exist.
American and Canadian monthly fares are usually higher than in Continental Western Europe, with multipliers in the 30s. New York’s multiplier was especially high, about 46, and the MTA has just abolished the monthly fare entirely and phased out the MetroCard (as of the new year, starting in two hours), making people use the weekly cap with OMNY instead, which has a multiplier of 11.7 and, over a 30-day month, forces a monthly multiplier of 50. Toronto has a very high monthly multiplier as well, 46.6. This is bad practice: a high monthly discount functions as a technologically simple off-peak discount (indeed, London pairs its stingy monthly discount with a substantial off-peak discount), and OMNY itself is buggy to the point that fare inspectors on the buses can’t tell if someone has actually paid except by looking at debit card statements, which do not show one as having paid if one has a valid transfer or has reached the weekly cap (and not tapping in this case is still illegal fare dodging in New York law).
The practice of the cap, increasingly popular in the US under London influence, is rare as well. London’s fare cap originates in its complex zone system: the Underground has nine zones with zone 1 only covering Central London so that passengers taking multiple trips per day can expect to take trips across different zones that they may not be familiar with; there isn’t fare integration, but rather there’s a special surcharge on some commuter train trips and a discount on buses; peak and off-peak fares are different. Thus, the calculation for the passenger of whether to buy tickets one at a time or get a pass is difficult, so Oyster does this calculation automatically to give the most advantageous fare. In a Continental city where fares are either flat regionwide or have zones with limited granularity (often the entire metro is in the innermost zone) and monthly discounts are steep, the calculation is simple: an even semi-regular rider should always get a monthly.
American and Canadian cities typically have flat fares or a simple zone system, good fare integration between buses and the subway or light rail, and commuter rail that’s functionally unusable for urban trips rather than resembling the subway with a $2 surcharge. The use case of London does not apply to such cities. New York should not have a fare cap, but a heavily surcharged single trip, perhaps $5, and an attractive flat monthly fare, perhaps $130. This system ensures passengers are incentivized to pay and there is little opportunistic fare dodging as the user has already prepaid for the entire month, so it pairs well with proof-of-payment fare collection, common in many of the European examples (though metro systems outside Germany and its immediate vicinity do have faregates).
The overall level of the fare is determined by the willingness of the government at various levels to subsidize public transport; the table can be used to compare these at PPP rates as well. However, the distribution of fares across different products and distances is not a matter of subsidy but a matter of good and bad industry practices, and the best practice for simple fare collection is to offer a prepaid monthly at a heavy discount compared with the single ride.
Pedestrian Observations 
Dallas Area Rapid Transit:
Local Passes:
$3 three-hour local pass ($1.50 reduced)
$6 day local pass until end of service around 1-2 AM ($3 reduced).
$126 local monthly pass ($63 reduced)
(Covers local buses, express buses, light rail, DART Silver Line commuter rail, and Trinity Railway Express commuter rail from Downtown Dallas to Centrepoint/DFW Airport).
Flat fare system has daily, monthly and yearly fare caps at the same amount as their respective passes making them useless.
Regional passes:
$6 one-way TRE
$12 regional day pass ($3 reduced)(general pass price set to be reduced to $9 in the spring of the new year).
$192 regional monthly pass
(Includes everything from local passes plus TRE all the way to Fort Worth, all Fort Worth Trinity Metro buses, Texrail commuter rail, all DCTA buses, and the DCTA A-Train commuter rail.
The commuter rail in Dallas has fare integration with the light rail and buses? Wow.
If I may be pedantic, the Spain 50% discount came because of the Ukraine war (technically because of the energy price crisis caused by it), not corona: the central government pays for 30% of the ticket price, under the condition that the regional government pays for the other 20%. The discounts have to be confirmed every year, and usually the budget isn’t allocated until there’s some last minute multi party political agreement, so it’s clear this is temporary: https://www.transportes.gob.es/transporte-terrestre/bonificaciones-transporte-publico
Madrid charges between 1,50 and 2 € for a single ticket, 7,30€ for a 10 trip (would be around 12,16 without the discount) and the monthly is 28,70€ (would be 57,40€ without discount).https://crtm.es/billetes-y-tarifas_old/billetes-y-abonos/metro/?idPestana=3
Madrid’s ticket is a bit less integrated than Barcelona one, for example not including Cercanías and some light metros.
Barcelona has been changing the fare policy lately. The single ticket has progressively been getting more ridiculously expensive (it’s one of the tourist traps embedded in the system), and until 2020 the 10-trip ticket was the most widely used and the benchmark for comparisons. The monthly ticket used to require 53 trips to be worth it: https://www.3cat.cat/3catinfo/a-partir-de-quants-viatges-ens-surt-a-compte-la-t-usual-o-la-t-casual/noticia/2968637/
In 2023, catalan government decided to remove the discount for the 10 trip ticket. Combined with the price changes of 2020, this has created a massive switch of users from 10 trip ticket to monthly ticket, and boosting ridership records: https://ce.atm.cat/en/web/portal-atm/w/np_el-transport-p%C3%BAblic-de-l-%C3%A0rea-integrada-de-barcelona-continua-en-xifres-r%C3%A8cord-es-registren-1135-milions-de-viatges-en-12-mesos-consecutius
Why did Catalonia decide to kill the 10 trip ticket in 2023? It’s parallel to other trends across Europe, not just the D-Ticket dropping the breakeven point for a monthly from non-New York American levels (Berlin used to be 36 relative to the four-trip discount) to sub-Swiss levels, but also Paris rationalizing the fare and dropping the carnet. The carnet was technologically weird – it wasn’t a multi-use ticket but 10 paper tickets sold in a bundle, forcing users to scramble for the right ticket at each trip; the breakeven point within the city was in the 50s, because of the flat regionwide monthly and zoned single fares, and of course Parisians had no real reason to visit the suburbs with any regularity with which to justify a monthly.
Publicly, they wanted a “more simplified model that encourages regular use of public transport; a public transport that we want to be more robust”: https://www.amb.cat/es/web/amb/actualitat/sala-de-premsa/notes-de-premsa/detall/-/notapremsa/les-tarifes-del-2020-afavoriran-els-usuaris-habituals–amb-la-nova-t-usual/8554668/11696
This, plus the discounts that came later (monthly T-Usual, compared to 10-trip T-Casual, pays off in less than 20 trips) seem to be an effort to push the modal share out of the car, considered beneficial by itself. I’m not sure they’re getting less people to use the car but clearly more people are using metro, despite bus frequency gradually worsening.
The whole change was done together with the switch from magnetic band to plastic tap in, one of those projects that went over budget, schedule, and unclear business requirements. I remember using something like the carnet in 2009 in Vancouver and it felt neolithic (gosh, I remember already using the plastic tap in card in London and Singapore around the same years).
So out of the big rich world cities we have data for, i.e. New York, Tokyo, Kansai, London, Paris and Istanbul all of them apart from Paris ‘functionally do not have monthlies’ – i.e. the monthly ticket is either only useful for commuting only as in Japan or it is only useful for very heavy users including off peak travel.
The other cites one could consider in the same camp would be maybe Singapore, Taipei and Seoul.
Looking at Singapore the monthly ticket is S$128 whereas a one way ticket from Jurong East to City Hall is S$2.11 so that would be 60 trips a month so that is more like London.
Seoul’s climate card costs the same as 45 one way cheapest subway fares, so is likely similar to Paris, on the other hand my gut feeling on the basis that there was no suggestion from Taiwan obsessed to get a monthly ticket that in Taipei it probably is generally best to do pay as you go unless you are a very heavy user.
This is extremely uncharitable. I much more reasonable explanation is that the fare cap is about delivering fair value to customers so they can use public transport without thinking about each and every ride and still getting a good price.
I have no idea what this is about unless you are talking about airport trips where you pay a premium in lots of places.
The best way to do this is for single tickets to represent a fair value to customers.
This does make it harder to quietly screw over tourists with effective dual pricing. But not screwing over the locals who are most easily swayed between transit and driving, is the generally more important goal.
The other thing that is true about London and the South East in general is that outside London is that the season tickets are much more reasonable. Reading to London you need to do under 100 round trips a year to justify the season ticket.
The biggest flaw in the monthly tickets I would say is that the outer zone but still TfL season tickets require more rides to justify than the zone 1/2 ones. I would say that it probably should be the opposite.
I would do precisely the opposite, why are we subsidising inner zone people over outer zone people when inner zone people are going to use public transport anyway? If anything the most important thing for inner zone people is the service frequency off peak which New York is the weakest of all the big cities.
Wait, doesn’t raising the base fare and setting a low-ish monthly subscription price (together with fare integration) subsidize outer commuters? I don’t see how it’s advantageous to inner zone people.
Because people in the inner city use public transport a lot more than people further out.
Yes commuters from further out who work in the city also do well (perhaps even better) with the Deutsche ticket.
But occasional users definitely do worse.
The concept inner and out zones should not exist in any transport system. The correct concept is how far people are going. If you live in an outer suburb and take transit 5km to your outer suburb job you should pay less than someone who is going to downtown, (the rare person going to an out suburb on the opposite side should pay more yet). Suburbs generally have the density to support good transit, but treating them like everyone is going downtown means they are too expensive for local trips. When you already have a car the incremental costs of one more trip are very low: zone fares ensure transit is more expensive.
Zones are not bad for large cities, but they should be distance from your front door to the destination. This is probably too difficult actually do, but there are plenty of ways to approximate it that are not as hard/confusing. Just having one price for “local” service and a second price that includes express/regional service is good enough – if someone really spends 3 hours riding a slow bus across the city that should be celebrated as look at the silly thing you can do (meanwhile normal people pay for the faster service and do it in .5).
In any case for a regular transit rider their costs need to be reasonable for the trips they are taking. For the irregular rider you should encourage them to become regular riders.
The London system has:
Seems pretty close to the ideal to me!
Perhaps the bus hopper fare should also work in conjunction with the trains.
Perhaps also the fares could be lower rather than being set at break-even level for the tube, but then the property taxes would have to be higher in exchange.
So the fare from Montauk to Port Jervis should be the same as the fare from Times Square to Columbus Circle?
There’s certainly a pretty strong case for e.g Banbury-Penzance via Reading costing the same as Plymouth-London does (last stop you don’t want to revenue extract) minus £30 (London-Reading off peak fare)
More difficult to price up Banbury-Penzance via Didcot/Bristol but clearly it should be cheaper than via Reading.
That would make it more competitive with driving and the current ridership for some of those trips by train is ultra low.
To repeat what I said “The correct concept is how far people are going”.
Montauk to Port Jervis is 200 miles; Times Square to Columbus Circle is about 1. People in Montauk who are making a 1 mile trip should pay about the same someone doing that Times Square to Columbus Circle trip. They should not pay extra just because someone else happens to travel from Montauk to Port Jervis trip, or more likely go to Times Square.
There are a lot of jobs, shops, parks, museums, friends… in the suburbs. Don’t focus your transit system only on the people who go downtown for work. (that is a major use so don’t ignore it either – but today everyone ignores those other trips thus forcing car dependency)
There are a lot of ways to solve the problem. In general I think a pure distance based fare is probably not correct either, but it would be better than charging someone a high price for a short trip.
I hope this isn’t a revelation. Zone 1 ( or zone A or zone whatever ) is separated from Zone 4 by Zone 2 and Zone 3 which makes Zone 4 farther away from Zone 1 than Zone 3. Montauk is in Zone 14 and if you want to travel within Zone 14 you pay a one zone fare.
If someone lives in Zone 4 and is traveling to Zone 4 then they shouldn’t pay the same price as if they were traveling all the way to Zone 1. That is how most zone systems I’m aware of are priced though. There is also the person who lives right on the edge of zone 4 and is going someplace just in zone 3, again this should not be a higher cost for the short trip that just happens to cross the zone boundary. If “if you want to travel within Zone 14 you pay a one zone fare” is true then I tentatively approve (tentatively because I’m not aware of that system’s fare structure and thus need to retain the right to object to something I’m not aware of today)
The Netherlands uses a system that is distance based. It does require to always tap in and tap out with your CC/Pass though.
Switzerland is also trialing a distance based pay-as-you-go system but that uses a smart phone to check in/out.
Because “inner zone people” (“Oh, my dear, the noise! and the people!”) are massively subsidizing suburban transit. Always have. Always will.
Packed trains and buses on minimum headways versus low frequency tidal-flow bougie parking lot shuttles. It must take a galactic economy brain to see which direction the money is really flowing regardless of superficial appearances.
I thought we already had adirondackbot3k around to provide utterly wrong takes at every turn on every single subject, but it seems it’s a big tent.
I mean strictly if we are talking about the United States upper middle class and rich property owners or perhaps in New York people who drive across the toll bridges are massively subsidising the train system because fares only cover a small percentage of the costs.
Pre-COVID the position in Britain was that the train services that made the largest surpluses were the suburban commuter lines. Now post COVID that has changed and the largest surplus overall is the tube, but that certainly it is close enough that if you were to give heavy tube users a massive discount that wouldn’t be the case.
With respect, this argument misses the point.
If you are talking about within a single organization (the MTA) then yes, bridge and tunnel tolls “subsidize” the subway and the commuter railroads, if one puts on extreme blinders.
But the MTA doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
The US does not accurately tax nor price the social cost of cars. We dump the negative externality of auto-centric design on society, where the piper ultimately gets paid through programs to remediate or mitigate natural disasters, poor health, inefficient energy usage through shitty architecture and wasteful land use – the list is endless; both in the short term (“I grew up next to the Bruckner Expressway and have had a headache every day of my life”) and the long (“we will need $150B to build sea walls around Greater New York’s landmasses, as depicted in season 1 of The Expanse”)
It is more accurate to say that transit-rich, dense, surplus-value-producing cities subsidize the rest of the country’s low-tax entitlement and presumptuousness. If gasoline and road use and parking was priced at a rate more appropriate to its negative effects, our cities would look very different.
Consider Philadelphia as another example. The conservative-dominated Pennsylvania Legislature was so adamant on stealing the surplus value from Philly and its inner burbs that a Pennsylvania House representative from Philly openly mused about authoring a bill to keep tax revenue more local, such that the comfortably gerrymandered Pennsatucky red-hat-wearing smooth-brains would no longer receive the surplus produced by those transit riders to keep their taxes low and their oxy habits topped up. As a result, SEPTA is eating its capital budget to keep transit running.
And that was just this past year. The myth of the virtuous yeoman farmer has been overpowering what actually drives this country’s prosperity since about 1783.
To localize the issue to “the bridge and tunnel crowd pays to keep subway fares low” is to miss the big picture.
Perhaps if the train was setup to work better for people in more rural parts of the state you would have fewer battles in the statehouse.
The problem is far more fundamental than train service. I can point to gerrymandering again, or rural-urban antipathy, or Trump, or history, or culture, but you can look all of that up yourself. To return to my original point: cities, and in some cases in the inner suburban belts, subsidize everyone else. It is false, therefore, to state that upper middle class/rich property owners/people who drive across toll bridges massively subsidize transit riders. From an MTA finances perspective, maybe. At a metro area level all the way up to national, absolutely not. And the MTA’s finances, ultimately, are a chimera. They are a separate book borne out of political history to park certain transportation costs outside of the state budget, and you can thank Moses for that mockery of representative democracy.
FYI: Congestion pricing is one tool to charge drivers for the damage they actually inflict.
I understand that if I take the New York City bus to a local destination it will be one zone. And many if I go to New York. And the other buses are one or two zones. And that I will, I know this is awful, terrible, a great inconvenience, if I take the bus to the train station I’ll have to pay another fare to use the train. With different fares depending on my destination. Terrible. Adulting is hard but they let me do this without assistance shortly after I was too tall to ride free. Without confusion.
The NYC Transit system includes practically all bus and subway trains in NY City, with a base fare of $3.00 and free transfers throughout the entire city. There are no free transfers to and from the regional rail systems.
Single ride tickets are good for two hours. Or were. You can’t use them in Chicago or Tokyo either. Why would it be good for a trip to Port Jervis or Montauk?
Other places manage to fare-integrate everything within a transit district. In Zurich this includes buses, trams, all types of trains, and boats. (They don’t have a subway.) In a German Verkehrsverbund only long-distance trains are excluded. But long-distance tickets often include a Verbund ticket for origin and/or destination.
This is independent of zones. You buy a ticket for a set of zones which allows you to use all means of transit within those zones. The validity period is long enough to cover the distance.
There is no reason why the MTA cannot offer an integrated ticket, e.g., from Westchester to JFK.
There’s no reason why they should either.
You don’t see the value in making the product easy to use?
Research shows, e.g., that fare integration increases ridership: https://www.worldtransitresearch.info/research/4296/
Give stuff away, for free, people take it. In other news water isn’t wet, it makes other stuff wet. Fire is still hot.
What does fare integration have to do with free? It just means having a single ticket for a single trip. Whether it’s more expensive than separate tickets or cheaper is an independent question. But as you didn’t argue the ease-of-use point maybe you’ve accepted that part.
From the paper you cite?
Happy New Year, Alon et al,
Monthly tickets appear to be effective in deterring fare evasion. Most people in Munich, for example, appear to have one.
I am not pleased by recent changes in Paris transit tickets. I liked the Carnet (ten tickets at a discounted price, which were good for bus, Metro & RER in the central area). Now, you have to load separate bus and Metro tickets on a Navigo card or phone. Because the bus ticket is cheaper, you cannot use it to transfer to the Metro or RER.
Also in Paris, as I recall, weekly and monthly tickets start at the beginning of the week or month; they are not valid for 7 days or a month from purchase date. That may be good for deterring use by visitors (like me), but they cause long delays at machines at the beginning of each day and month.
Happy new year to you too!
Fare gates also work well for this! Also I am really not against monthly passes at all, I just think you need to think carefully about the level they are set at – too low in the largest places where people are unlikely to have a car anyway and you aren’t raising as much revenue as you can from heavy users.
I rather like the Chamonix approach for tourists where free public transport is included with the tourist tax.
I think that could work for bigger cities as well. Charge £10/day tourist tax to stay in London and include free public transport in London including a return trip to the airport on the Heathrow Express.
192 seconds of checking other airports that brand themselves as London shows that they also have train services branded as express.
Salzburg does this state-wide so that the tourism tax (actually a different mandatory surcharge to be exact) includes state-wide public transport. This seems to work really well, especially at getting tourist out of their car for doing visits to the city on bad weather days. I hope we’ll get the same thing soon in Tyrol as tourist cars clog the city streets in Innsbruck really badly during bad weather days and impact public transport a lot.
That is penalizing infrequent transit users. Obviously people want to penalize tourists, and that scheme is a clever way of doing dual pricing for tourists vs locals, but it also makes transit a less attractive option for infrequent transit users who own cars, so need the most convincing to use transit to begin with.
Also, Japan has much higher transit ridership, much less fare evasion, and is able to cover a substantially higher fraction (often all the way to profitability) out of fare revenue, with a model of fair single ticket fares
It would take a lot more evidence and reasoning to argue against fair single ticket fares as best practice
Both the German and the Japanese system are IMO convenient because they remove the friction of buying tickets and are integrated almost nationally. However, while implementing proof of payment fare enforcement should be more or less free no matter the city, implementing fare gates has a non-zero cost.
The German system isn’t great for occasional users though. There’s a lot of people who only use the trains a handful of times a year.
Plus you are not getting anywhere near as much revenue from heavy users as e.g Britain, France or Japan do because for them the pass is extremely good value.
This is incomprehensible Anglo-gibberish.
The “German system” is that you need to have a ticket to ride.
Pretty radically different from what they use in Merry Olde England, amirite?
“Buying a ticket” is in fact a simpler thing for “people who only use the trains a handful of times a year” — they don’t have to consider whether to buy a day’s or a week’s or a year’s worth of tickets, they just buy a ticket. Just like in OId Blighty. They possibly pay more than they might have if they’d spent hours of their precious hours of life on earth researching Advanced Saver Ryanair OuiGo Nonrefundable Ultraspar options. Just like in OId Blighty.
This sounds just terrible. Terrible.
Richard, the transport system has a budget.
For a given service level you can either have cheaper passes or cheaper single rides.
In a city if you go to work by car, bike or walking then the pass requires you to do a dozen non work trips a month, which is more than the London zone 2 pass requires workers and for the outer suburbs is a lot.
Even if you live outside a big city and the pass is better value you still have to make a couple of return trips a month for the pass to be worth it. For the countryside that’s a lot.
On the other hand people who live in a big city and use public transport to get to work do extremely well out of it.
If you want to penalise tourists have a higher tourist tax. Angkor Wat charges $37 for a one day visit. So Venice could charge €50/visit or €100/visit with €50 of vouchers easily
The problem with tourist taxes for transit is that good transit defeats tourist taxes on accommodation.
Tourist taxes on attractions are often difficult (e.g. Kyoto can’t impose a tourist tax on religious institutions) to impossible (e.g. Shibuya can’t impose a tourist tax on crossing the street). Border based tourist taxes are so broad that it can’t be used to effectively adjust transit pricing based on tourist status, and exempts all tourists that don’t need to cross a border.
If New York City had a tourist tax of even $200/room/night, but that meant local people would approve some new hotel construction then tourists would probably come out ahead.
And New York probably has the worst transit for tourists of major cities – especially from further away. But also is the most likely I wouldn’t stay in the city itself because the hotels cost so much.
Innsbruck, Austria:
Single Ride: 3.20EUR flat fare
24h Innsbruck City: 7.00EUR
One week city/region/state: 26.80/29.50/53.20EUR
One month city/region/state: 67.80/91.60/118.00EUR
One year city/region/state/country: 448.30/458.00/590.00/1400.00
Additionally, there is a 40% discount on the state wide ticket for additional tickets past the first one in the same household.
For major Austrian cities:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R5saTQy5GjS5Pw16puFAeqRgwGxJezi_KWyHorWRxyc/edit?gid=1839978088#gid=1839978088
For Innsbruck, the tickets in the city proper are issued by the Innsbrucker Verkehrsbetriebe und Stubaitalbahn GmbH (IVB), only the regional tickets are issued by the VVT.
An issue I believe you fail to highlight is the transaction friction of these different regimes.
If I’m forced to detour through a architectural funnel slowing and restricting station access where I am fprced to interact with a a fare gate (very likely supplied by sole-sourced by rent-seeking big-rigging sub-human scam Cubic Systems, Inc.) before I am allowed to get to a train platform, or if I am or compelled to “tap in” (very likely on a device supppied ditto) on every boarding and even alighting from a bus of tram, then I am performing involunatary labour for the profit and glory of Cubic Systems, Inc (or whomever your local national surveillance monopolist might be) every single trip I make, often multiple times per trip, sometimes twice on each leg of each trip.
This is in addition to whatever involuntary labour (if any) I performed to “register an account”, or “buy a smartcard” or whatever, and it happens forever, making every trip slower and every trip more invconvenient.
This bullshit “tag-on tag-off” dance is often compelled even after any “fare capping” threshold is met. Can’t be too careful to ensure somebody isn’t getting away with something, somehow! Tag, tag, tag, dutiful citizens!
If in contrast I purchase a time/geography limited ticket in advance (from a vendiing machine, from Teh Internets, whatever) then I have been forced to undertake a single transaction, and from then on I board trains or ferries or buses from any door as often as I like as long as I remain within the time and space validity zones of the ticket.
Yes, I may be asked to produce evidence that I have a valid ticket. But as long as this occurs less than once per trip I am ahead.
My trips are as low-friction on the first day of a 30-day (for example) ticket validity as they are on the last. (ie I do nothing, unless a ticket inspector requests to inspect my ticket.)
In contrast, a high-friction Cubic Systems-profiting “London is the Only Foreign City we’ve Ever Visisted did you know they speak English there? And Cubic fluently?” fare-capping regime means that I’m constantly performing the seek-out-a-Cubic-device-and-tag-on dance every single trip. Qui bono?
Fare capping is maybe a nice “also and”, but it’s a bullshit as a replacement for zero-friction pre-validated travel. Only the worst people propose it, and they’re nearly always paid to do so.
Tapping a credit card on a reader in and out is as simple as it gets Richard.
And if you did have an account you can use more than one, but you very much don’t have to.
Not tapping anything on anything is simpler, Matthew.
Your smart-card-reader-vending overlords thank you for your continued devoted unpaid service to their cause.
But for it to be less friction then you have to have a pass. And for occasional users for whom it is the biggest overhead to buy a ticket they won’t have a pass in any country.
I really don’t think anyone thinks tap in and out is a burden on TfL. Maybe we are all brainwashed?
Dude, I’m done with your replies. You win. Enjoy.
Yesterday I arrived at Schiphol and took the train to Amsterdam Centraal.
Pretty much all the tourists on the train had failed to tap in at Schiphol. They had heard somewhere that you can just tap in using your credit card, but expected to be able to do that on the train, as they did not encounter fare gates on the way to the platform.
Then in Amsterdam central they could not get through the gates, as they had not checked-in. In the end everyone just followed someone else through a gate…
This is the problem with fare gates not consistently applied.
Zurich does not have this issue. It is pretty clear when you arrive at the airport station where to buy your ticket. and that you need a ticket to board.
Sometimes making it too easy is not a good idea…
Not having fare gates at the airport is insane if you are doing credit card ticketing.
The sorts of stations that don’t have them here are rural and some commuter stations.
I have never seen a fare gate that was significant friction compared to figuring out how to correctly pay for the ride in the first place. The gate is in fact a feature because it stops me from going too far before I have paid – I’m trying to be honest here, I don’t want my first clue that I screwed up to be the random fare check charging me for a crime! (even if they just charge a fine, that is still more than what I rightly owe). The gate just doesn’t open and in most places there is a helpful local who will see my confusion and help me figure out what I really need.
Of course once I’ve used the system a few times I’m an expert and the above doesn’t apply. Whatever the convoluted rules are I know how they apply to me. The only problem with a gate then is some of them are slow (I can see my train is there and I could just make it – if only that gate would let me through).
I’m not saying a gate is the right answer. There are many different answers with different pros and cons.
This isn’t about you as a tourist in a foreign city trying to work out how to get from your hotel to the national art gallery or whatever.
It’s about daily use by hundreds of thousands of people.
“Figuring out how to correctly pay” is something they only need to do once. “Correctly paying” is something one has to do once (per day, per week, per month, per year, whatever.) In contrast, being detoured and coralled through fare gates is something that happens many times a day; likewise being forced to endure glacial bus service because at every stop every person is forced to board through a single door, or every person is forced to find their phone or smart card and wave it performatively at a device instead of getting on and getting moving.
You don’t notice this because you’re soaking in it. You think it’s normal. Anything else is weird. You defend what you’re used to because it’s normal. You’re used to it. You sort of weirdly enjoy the punishment eventually.
This is a bizarre take. First clue that you might need to have a ticket is that you are on board a bus or a train.
But I guess you’re talking about stations that have “fare required” zones. Honestly, if figuring out what the large, clear and numberous signs and what the paint on the floor mean then this seems a hopeless cause. Just take a taxi. Support the local service economy like a good tourist.
What you don’t even notice is the slowness you endure just to be sent to and then through the faregates.
You don’t notice that, say, you were standing on the street right above a train underground that you wish to ride, but that you have to walk to one of the limited number of station entrances (limited because everything has to be sacrified to pay for over-sized mezzanine levels and paid areas in the station) then you have to walk to one of the limited number of fare gate barriers (these things are expensive, can’t put in too many, sacrifices in passenger walk time must me made) and only then can you walk down to the train platform. A train is a long skinny thing and there should be ways to easily get to all of its doors, but in fact you’re most likely to walk “along” the train to get to a spot where you’re allowed to get to the train, and then you have to walk along the train again to avoid crowding.
You don’t notice this stuff because it’s normal. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and it has real costs, both in crazily inflated station footprints and construction costs, but in your wasted time making detours every single day, and in terms of the transportation that doesn’t exist because it’s so expensive to build oversized stations.
I do notice this stuff. It’s depressing. I walk down the stairs of our few downtown local metro stations to the mezzanine and I can SEE the stairs going down to the platform where the train is about to depart RIGHT THERE, steps away from me, but they’re on the other side of a barrier, and I have to walk 20m to the fare gates and walk 20m back to the stairs, and I’ve missed the train.
Fare gates are not that expensive. Install more of them. Sure they are not free, but they should not be that expesnive. (Insert one of Alon’s many rants about the US paying too much for everything here…) While we are at it we should install elevators – they also should not be that expensive and the ADA was so 1990…
The things you are complaining about are valid to complain about and should be fixed. However they are not the fault of fare gates.
Fare gates have a penelty on evacuation times of station thus you need sufficient space for bunching in front of them as well as ventilation to keep this big space smoke-free for the required time according to applying code. So every fare gated entrance needs a large big box plus room for additional infrastructure. Except for old systems I find that fare gated systems have less entrances than a typical underground Stadtbahn station in Germany. Most LA Metro stations (that are deep underground and fare apart) only have a single entrance (and of cause it’s a pavillion taking up expensive real estate instead of multiple holes in the sidewalk). A system carrying less people per day than small town German tram systems.
OK. You pay for them and install them. Cubic Systems Inc thanks you, personally. You’re doing the lord’s work. And all as a volunteer!
It is said that a fish has no word for water. An analogy with dung beetles might be more fitting though.
In support of Richard, once you’ve experienced the non-faregated, proof-of-payment systems of Germany and Switzerland it’s hard to see any positives with the alternative. Take Alexanderplatz S-Bahn station in Berlin (an elevated station): it’s just part of the broader urban environment, you don’t even really register whether you’re “in” the station or not. The low tech ticketing system is also REALLY cheap to implement, it just needs TVMs and ticket-stampers on the platform.
The upside for smartcard systems is on buses. Unless you have a periodical or a pre-bought ticket, it’s a lot more of a hassle (and time-consuming for the entire bus) to buy a specific ticket from the driver than to just wave your credit card in front of a machine. The BVG is trying to solve this with its app, but I don’t see much uptake, and my sense is that fare evasion on short bus trips is basically the norm in Berlin.
I am sure the criminal penalties for fare evasion in Germany help. But even so I think the 5% evasion estimate is probably an underestimate compared to reality with some non payers getting off the train to avoid the checkers.
No we got automatic passenger counting systems and methods how to catch even those people that try to jump out of the bus/train when they see uniformed conductors on the platform. 5% is quite often the upper end in poor areas the norm is more like 2-3% “EBE-Quote”. Of cause there’s a hardcore minority that is on telegramm/whatsapp group warning each other where “Ticket-Ficker” roam the system but these are usually young men in their twenties. What really helps is subsidized tickets for students and people on Bügergeld. That takes out a huge chunk out of the most likely people that most likely would try to dodge paying. Old people pay anyways but giving them discounted monthly avoids the strain on the system that is grannies taking out their change to pay the bus driver. One thing that makes PoP more difficult in the UK or the US is that there’s a registry with everyone’s home adress – if the culprit doesn’t produce an ID to the conductor team he (99% it’s an he) has to proof his identity to the police.
Vibes based planning is always the best planning.
@Richard, I got AI to say 55% of people were evading fares, so that’s the vibes based answer!
Seriously looks like 5% on the U Bahn and 2.4% on the S Bahn as per https://www.the-berliner.com/english-news-berlin/how-many-people-without-a-ticket-public-transport-bvg-s-bahn-2023/
It’s 3.4% in London across all modes (including buses) for what it’s worth – https://content.tfl.gov.uk/revenue-protection-our-strategic-approach-summary.pdf
In Proof-of-payment systems like used in Switzerland and Germany there may be an appearance of widespread fare evasion, because people just board and take a seat, without showing anything to the driver.
But in fact this is a consequence of the fare system, that encourages people to get monthly or yearly passes. And once you have a pass you just hop on and off vehicles at will, and do not bother the driver, who prefers you do not board through his door anyway…
Passes aren’t much use for people who do 20 one way trips a year or fewer.
That’s most people who use the train in any country (except maybe Japan).
Ok maybe Switzerland with a mean ridership of 70 also has a median above 20 – but it is doubtful for the others given some people will be doing 400 to 500.
@Matthew Hutton
Most train riders are using it every day to get to work. Sure Amtrak style cross country trains, I would expect most people to use less than 20 trips per year. However there are a lot of regional rail systems around the world that people use every day. Most of the discussion in this thread is around U bahn and S bahn systems – both trains which are intended for daily use.
If your train is mostly used by people who are using it every day a monthly pass that makes it easy to ride is better for everyone – a discount for the rider, and since it encourages compliance (a one time fee) is the way to go.
If you are talking about amtrak style long distance trips a pass is of less use just because so many fewer people would buy it. Still not useless though.
@henrymiller74, even in the US peak trips only make up 2/3rds of all trips and there will be a fair few people travelling at peak times who aren’t travelling by train every day.
It’s still pretty doubtful that the median train user in the US is using the train more than a handful of times a year. Certainly it’s pretty doubtful in e.g Britain or France where off peak is around half of all train users.
This can be orthogonalized to be combined at will:
The Netherlands, for instance, combine tapping with proof of payment.
Un Fare Transit (Transit Inequality in Metro Vancouver)
The highest average fares in Canada. • A complicated and unfair 3 zone fare structure implemented in 1984 when cash, paper tickets and paper transfers were the only option. • No free (or very low) fares for seniors, teens/youth 13-18, or low income citizens aged 19-64. • Different fares for buses vs trains vs SeaBus vs West Coast Express (WCE). • No fare integration with BC Transit, unlike southern Ontario (has had a single fare card) since Feb. 2024, usable on 11 transit systems. • In many transit systems seniors/teens pay around 50% of adult fares, but about 70% (cash) to 80% (Compass Card stored value) in Metro Vancouver. • Seniors/Youth get no discount for Compass Card stored value versus cash fares. Adult stored value is about 20% cheaper than cash fares. • No daily or weekly fare caps that exist at many transit systems. • No weekend /3-day or weekly/ 7-day transit passes. Monthly passes can only be bought during the last 10 days of the previous month. Other systems allow a 31-day pass to be purchased on any day of the month. • Compass Card monthly pass break even points (pass cost / stored value fare): 1-zone – $111.60 / $2.70 = 41.3 trips (21 round trips) 2-zone – $149.25 / $4.00 = 37.3 trips (18 round trips) 3-zone – $201.55 / $5.10 = 39.3 trips (20 round trips) Concession – $63.80 / $2.25 = 28.3 trips (14 round trips) • A 1-zone pass priced at 50% of the adult cost for senior/youth would increase the round-trip value for senior/youth: o Monthly passes for Seniors and Teens are not available for zone 1 and 2, only the more expensive 3 zone pass is available. Also there is no discount. Very limited overnight bus services, compared to Montreal and Toronto. • Inconsistent hours of service and frequencies on many bus routes, SeaBus and SkyTrain makes it harder for passengers who need to transfer. • Very limited regional rail service. • No washrooms at SkyTrain stations and major bus exchanges. • Limited HandyDART service. • Financing of HandyDART is different and more expensive at TransLink than it is at BC Transit • Very few bike parkades at stations and or bus exchanges. • No funding for bus shelters on municipal roads. BC Transit provides some funding to assist municipalities with bus shelter purchases. • The elimination of over 15% of Vancouver’s bus stops from 2020 to 2024, plus another 5% in 2025-2026, has not resulted in noticeable improvements in service. • No On-Demand Transit, also known as Demand Response Transit. • Lower hours of service per-capita than Whistler, Victoria, Montreal, and Toronto. • No support for the BC Federation of Labour’s major report ConnectingBC, which proposes doubling the bus fleet in three years and tripling it in six years among its many recommendations.