Paris Métro paper ticket reaches end of the line after more than 120 years

Do you have a source for that?

NYC is moving to a system called OMNY, where you can either hunt down a retailer with the cards or just use tap-to-pay. I suspect many casual riders will use the latter because of the low friction, but it's indeed not anonymous.

Why do they need ID for city travel tickets? That's just crazy. Really crazy. Where will all this madness end? Why isn't anyone saying: "Hey, asking for ID data in order to travel by bus is pure China-like craziness!"?

Or the paper ticket is even slightly bent. Or bent in half. Or mildly wet. Or a corner is folded. Or sometimes it looks fine but just won't work. Or it works at one station but not another.

I say all that because each situation happened to me on my visit to Barcelona this summer :)

I also had a problem where I had to basically rebuy a new 10-trip ticket twice within a day of each other, because the first got folded in a bag, and the other I thought I misplaced (only to find it at the absolute bottom of a heavily packed shopping bag). Oh and the one day I tried to get my folded ticket replaced, the only station I passed through was closed early! How convenient :)

Basically, those paper tickets WERE a pain. But I don't like the new photo ID cards they're introducing either. Good luck I suppose...

They failed you, because such a card exists and is called the Navigo Easy, costs €2, and you can load individual trips on it. Unfortunately the machines don't sell the cards yet, so you have to talk to a human.

That hasn’t been true for years. Anyone can get a pay-as-you-go card which you can top up from your phone or a machine inside every station. The only issue is that you have to buy them either from a counter in a station or from one of the numerous approved shops.

You can also pay the bus from inside. I don’t know what you are talking about. From the tone of your post, you probably didn’t bother saying hello and just started talking in English so the driver told you to get lost.

London gets this (mostly) right, because there "contactless card" includes Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Maestro credit and debit cards, and smartphones with equivalent contactless payment. The local transport card (Oyster) is only needed for other fares (e.g. child-rate tickets) or season tickets of a month or longer.

Travel from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton airports is included in this.

(The only thing they could improve is the signage at Heathrow. They promote the expensive Heathrow Express train, when many people would be better taking an Elizabeth Line train on the same rails — 15 minutes slower and ¼ the price.)

(One more thing, last month they seem to have introduced a £5-£7 cost to get an Oyster card, which seems needlessly extortionate for visitors that do need them. Years ago it was a small deposit, which you could get returned in cash at the machine.)

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...

Next time, if that happens again, you need to be more assertive, by going with a: "Ma vai fanculo, vai!" (difficult to translate), followed by a more mellow "io non pago niente!" (I won't pay anything), and physically try to make a way out of the whole situation.

Granted, I'm not an Italian and I don't live in Italy, but I do live in a city very similar to Rome in many other aspects, and I've seen myself around these parts how foreign tourists are sometimes "hunted" for fines the same as it happened to you. In many cases those applying the abusive fines go for the "easy prey", as soon as you show some hints of fighting back they let you go, so to speak, not worth the hassle for them (especially as they also know that they're doing something very shitty and abusive).

Yep, this is how it is in Japan (but without the account bit). You buy a Suica or Passmo card at the airport when you arrive for 500 yen, "charge" it with a bunch of cash (which you helpfully get at the 7-bank ATM down the hall), then you can use that *everywhere in the whole country* for public transit, and many other things too if you want, like vending machines and many restaurants. (It's generally better to use a credit card for places that take it, but still, the option exists.) There's no advantage for locals either; everyone gets the same card, and it's not linked to any account.

Finally, when you're ready to leave the country, you can visit the customer service counter and surrender the card, and they will give you (in cash) the remaining balance on the card, plus the 500 yen deposit.

Also, unlike in Paris, you don't have to worry about any rude service people in Japan. Everyone is always polite here.

a) for a long time a personal card was only obtainable with a Dutch bank account and/or address of residence

b) the only improvement these days is that residents of the countries with a direct border with the Netherlands (i.e. Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany) can get one, too, but it still needs to be ordered in advance. And anybody else is still left out, even though e.g. a resident of Lille (in France) is actually living closer to the Dutch border than a German from Munich.

Another thing is that with the switch from paper tickets to the OV chipkaart they sort of got rid of cross-operator through tickets, which means that

a) e.g. when travelling on the national railway network, you now need to pay attention whether you're also changing train operators when happening to change trains – in that case you must check out and back in again

b) checking out and back in resets reset the distance-based fare price degression, so it's more expensive. I think they continued tweaking some things here, so it's no longer quite as egregious as when originally introduced, but it's still somewhat of a step back compared to real through tickets.

And for anonymous chipkaarts there's a relatively high minimum top-up (technically 20 €, effectively 16 € as you're allowed 4 € of overdraft) required in order to be allowed to travel on the railways at all, which is unattractive for occasional travellers and shortish trips that might otherwise only cost a few euro (in which case a single use ticket might be a better option, as it "only" carries an 1 € surcharge).

I have to admit that I have also used to ride without ticket when I was younger.

Pain au chocolat, yes ! Chocolatine, no !