Re: Validators that NEVER work

[wauer@qspr03.tuwien.ac.at (Wolfgang Auer)]

Dear Group, Dear Roderick,

Roderick Smith wrote:

>I spent Saturday travelling around Wien (Austria) on an all-day ticket. 

Thank you for the short summary of your trip.

>There, the validators DO work.  This excellent system has no barriers;

Well, all rail transit systems in the German speaking world are
true POP systems without barriers, and I would rate everything
else as pretty inconvenient.

>a ticket is validated once (ie on the first trip)

*That* is the point. A one-time validation is an essential step in
the career of a single ticket indeed, but more than once...
In addition, weekly, monthly and yearly passes don't need to be
validated at all. You just buy them, put them into your briefcase,
and voilà, there they stay untouched unless you are inspected
(which occurs, say, twice a month or so if you ride regularly).
This is the practice used in all German speaking cities with urban
rail service I know.

On the other hand (sorry if this sounds smartalecky from a
non-resident), when Melbourne had connies, you had to pull out
your ticket after every boarding as well, just as it is the case
with MetCard, isn't it? (I'm expecting an outcry now, "No, that's
something completely different" :-)

>and is available for trams, buses, suburban trains and the metro.

... and, in addition, is even valid on all long-distance trains as
long as you don't leave the zones for which your ticket is valid.
It's quite a strange thing to board an ICE high-speed train with a
simple tram ticket, I can assure you.

>People do not seem to cheat the system.

<low voice>
Shhh, a certain number of people do...
</low voice>

But the percentage of fare evaders is surely less than 5% (sorry,
I don't have exact figures handy). However, in my humble opinion,
the penalty (legally, it's rather a "surcharge") for being caught
without a ticket is much too cheap, it's only about 70AUD, which
does not get more expensive for repetitive offenses. So for the
occasional rider, it *could* even pay not to buy a ticket, but
fortunately, very few passengers think so. And after all, don't
forget that the percentage of pass holders is 90+% of all patrons.

>At 6.25 [on a Sunday morning!] an inspector boarded the tram.

That's quite a recent invention; formerly, you could be quite sure
not to be inspected on Sundays or late evenings. Fortunately, this
practice has really changed as your report shows.

How was the behaviour of the inspector, if I may ask? Did he (or
she?) already carry one of the new ID cards with him/her rather
than those old, meaningless metal sheet things?

>Wien also has every tram stop named

An invention of the 1970s, as far as I know. Unfortunately, tram
stop names still aren't unique. There are different stops called
"Kaiserstraße", e. g. In addition, the same stop can have
different a name for each route it serves ("Kaiserstraße" on tram
route 49 equals "Westbahnstraße" on route 5), and the unfortunate
practice to denote the same stop by two different names on the
same route, depending only from the direction of the tram (the
"Knöllgasse" stop on eastbound tramways on route 6 equals the
"Quellenstraße" stop on westbound trams), still isn't completely
extinct. However, the denotation of tram stops with official names
is something very useful anyway. But unlike Melbourne, we don't
have numbers for tram stops (apart from those internally used).

>every stop with a timetable for all routes which stop there

These timetables used to be the source of much annoyance by being
comparatively inaccurate and confusing until recently. These
weeks, they have been comprehensively replaced with much better
designed timetables, which either show the accurate departure
times or (if the headways are 6 minutes or less) the frequency.

>announcements of every stop in advance

... an example of which is available at
http://qspr03.tuwien.ac.at/~wauer/nv/ans_en.html
(to be extended soon :-)

Best regards from Wien (Vienna, Austria), Wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Auer --------------------------------- ohne AUTO doppelt MOBIL
http://qspr03.tuwien.ac.at/~wauer/ --- mailto:wauer@qspr03.tuwien.ac.at