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Comment by krsdcbl | Hacker News Reader

Adding one lesser known example of imho outstanding public transportation service is Vienna, Austria - not the largest of cities, at 1.9 Mio inhabitants, and about half the area of Berlin (or 1/4 of London), still the 6th largest city in Europe.

You can get almost anywhere within half an hour tops, the Metro runs till after midnight weekdays and 24/7 on the weekends, there's an extensive system of Tramways & Busses to cover anything a bit farther from a Metro station.

And you can get a yearly subscription, giving you all-inclusive usage of the services for 1€/day, billed monthly.

This is mostly to stress the point of how much you take such a system for granted when it's available and just works - since I've moved here owning a car would be almost an inconvenience, and even London feels like a horrible public transportation experience.

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> And you can get a yearly subscription, giving you all-inclusive usage of the services for 1€/day, billed monthly.

This kind of thing is key - make it easy to use transit and lower the marginal cost of doing so. Yearly subscriptions are good. London's approach—unify almost all modes under the same payment system with automatically calculated caps and discounts—also works quite well as you don't have to think about buying passes, individual tickets, etc. Just tap and go and the system takes care of it for you.

Not many places in the US have this level of integration yet. For instance, the NYC Ferry, NYC Subway, LIRR, Metro North, PATH, and regional Amtrak service all use disjoint ticketing methods. It'll slowly get integrated over the next decade, but it greatly increases the mental effort needed to hop on transit. Perhaps the closest in the US is the Bay Area's Clipper Card - they managed to shoehorn over a dozen area agencies onto the same payment method - but it's still not quite as good as something like London's Oyster.

The TAP card in Los Angeles is good for dozens of local public transport companies. For quite a while, this was not the case; you could only use it on Metro (County-level agency). The integration over the years has certainly increased my use of transit in the area; there are many tiny, obscure transit systems in Los Angeles County and I can ride almost all of them now without having to carry any cash or change. Sometimes you can even get cross-company transfer fares with the TAP. It's fantastic.

https://www.taptogo.net/articles/Website_content/where-to-ri...

> 1€/day, billed monthly

Nitpick: AFAIR it's only 1 EUR per day if you pay the whole 365 EUR for the year at once. If you pay monthly, it's 396 EUR for the whole year. This is a pet peeve of mine as it's a good example of how expensive it can be to be poor.

However if you're getting used to the subway system running every 3-5 minutes you get agitated if you have to wait 15 minutes (or even need to plan when to arrive at the station)

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