In some places, like Oslo's metro, tram & bus systems, the solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're trusted to have bought a ticket for your journey. There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance.
>In some places, like Oslo's metro, tram & bus systems, the solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're trusted to have bought a ticket for your journey.
Yes, in high trust societies, you can do things like this.
Today we have to lock deodorant and toothbrushes behind bars in our pharmacies so it's not looted. We are not the same.
I was watching a travel show about France and in Paris it seems tourists can get confused as to where their ticket is for. They can easily end up on a train in an area their ticket isn't for. You get a 100 Euro fine! And that's an honest mistake not trying to get away without buying a ticket.
Like a lot of rules, enforcement needs to be realistic, appropriate and not overly harsh. In Oslo at least, the obvious tourists tend to get let off with just buying a ticket, even though the ticket app makes it easy to buy the correct ticket. If you speak Norwegian they often look at your travel history to see if you’re a regular payer who just forgot.
> "We got fined for getting off the train at the wrong stop" is not much of a travel story though.
I was on a plane recently and two people in the row behind me were having a lengthy moan about their respective travel experiences / disasters. They stopped escalating when one of them said "That's nothing, we were just coming in to land when the volcano started to erupt."
I was really tempted to stand up and pitch in with a line about landing in Tokyo when Godzilla chose that precise moment to attack, but the fasten-seatbelts sign had just lit up, so I didn't.
Pretty sure you wouldn't want to make two of those in succession. I mean, last time I had to pay a fine for not having The Correct Blessed Type Of Ticket, I did pay a lot of attention to the tickets I bought next. (Wasn't as expensive as in Paris, but still a palpable mistake.)
Most North American cities sadly don’t operate at the level of trust required for a system like that to work, as much as I agree it would be better for everyone.
Many cities in North America do. The key is the fine for not having a ticket is high enough that you are on average much better off having a ticket. Generally this works out to enough random inspections that the average person is checked once a month, and the fine for not having a ticket works out to the cost of a 3 month pass. The exact numbers are of course subject to debate, but the above should give any city a good starting place they can play with.
IMHO, if you have fare gates they need to be tied into a parent control system so that parents to limit where their kids are allowed to go alone. I've never seen the implemented and the details are important to get right.
Where I live, I'd be far better off not buying the tickets. The fine is less than 2 months with a pass and I'm checked 2-3 times a year. Yet most of these checks don't find anyone without a ticket. Monthly ticket costs about 1.5% of average monthly income for that city, less than 4% of minimal wage. I'm quite convinced that reasonable pricing is the key.
That's probably a significant part of it. Also accessibility of the monthly passes. I used to live near a rail stop in Tempe/Phx area, and would use it when I had to go to the airport or to Downtown Phx as it was easier than dealing with parking. The ticket kiosks were a bit of a pain, but easy enough, widely available and not overly expensive.
I didn't use it that much, but did see ticket checks on one of the trips, nobody was without one.
The way you pay for those buses is also kinda ridiculous. You're supposed to know that it costs something like $1.75 and you're supposed to have the exact amount in cash, no change given. But maybe it changed since 2016.
>There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance.
I'll likely mangle the explanation but this sort of policy does not fair well when there is a large divide between have/have-not and little/no social safety net.
If you are poverty level you will be forever stuck in this cycle: Ticket/fine, court, loss of income, etc. What might work is simply granting free access below a certain income threshold.
What many people do not realize is that one function of tickets is to prevent access to public transportation to people below a certain income threshold. If you do not, you have people using public transport as homeless shelter, urinate, smell badly, openly doing drugs, etc which leads to normal people stopping using public transport and then happily defunding it (as nobody reasonable uses it anymore - too dangerous and unpleasant).
Those activities are mostly against policy already but current political environment makes it impossible to enforce nuisance laws. Ticket price is a reasonable alternative even if it hurts a few deserving poor people.
Also a program for free rides to places like abuse shelters (for all genders - battered women is sexist talk!), voting booths and others similar locations should be in place - if you are going to one of them the checker verifies that are on the direct route to such a place and gives you a ticket - once you get there they validate your ticket - while if you don't arrive they send the police looking for you (in the case of abuse not arriving is a sign of urgent trouble, in other cases the police can arrest you when they feel like it)
But there still needs to be some sort of validator that you need to use, doesn't it? I've been to two cities with a similar system where you're trusted, Helsinki and Berlin. In Helsinki there are validators that people tap some kind of multiple-trip card on. In Berlin there are very analog paper tickets that you have to put into a "Drucker" on the platform, it stamps it with the date, time, and station name.
It depends if the tickets are trip based or time based, for time based system you don't always need validator.
I have visited Prague in 2019 and their subway had no barriers, ticket machines were tucked somewhere in the corner so that I had to actively look around.
Interestingly the metal poles where sticking out of the floor up to waist height with a spacing like that they used to have validators on them before.
Since I had a 3 day ticket and I validated it on the bus when going from the airport I didn't need a validator. Their trams and buses had validators in usual places, so subway probably has them too but not in an obvious place or the ticket machines already print ticket with time on it so you don't need to validate it.
There was a push for a gated system here, some years ago. The vendor tried to sell it on massive cost savings...and was publicly humiliated by a bunch of geeks with an Excel table. Turns out, installing and running the gates would, at best, bring parity with random ticket inspections+fines - while impeding passenger flow as a bonus.
It's not necessarily a matter of education: just the feeling of "not worth freeloading (at the price), I'm likely to get caught anyway" is sufficient.
Calgary's light rail is like this, at least to-date. I don't know if fare compliance is an issue, but security and homelessness is and that may add physical fare-only barriers in the near future
