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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

The same is going on here in Barcelona. They have the new electronic ticket but you need to pay for it, then get it sent to your home and it's not anonymous like most of the paper ones were.

You can get one on your phone too but it still doesn't solve the anonymity problem. Even if you get it on the phone you need to submit photo ID first :( Still a royal pain for tourists too.

They also (next year) want to stop the super easy 1,10 euro per trip (any trip any mode) tariff. Which also makes everything easy because there's no need to do an exit scan. Besides the hassle that the paper tickets were (they become unreadable if you look at them wrong) I don't really see any positives to this new system.

Besides that it has taken many more years and millions to introduce than planned. And it's already been hacked before it went live because someone didn't change the admin/admin passwords on the website... Gotta love government operations.

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> Even if you get it on the phone you need to submit photo ID first

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!"?

Discount/subsidies for locals

That's a shame. I just paid for a T-casual with cash and it worked beautifully throughout the week despite becoming a crumpled mess by the end of my trip.

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.

NYC tap to pay is a beautiful system. Seamless with any mobile phone, and if you have an apple watch the integration is insane -- just put the watch near the reader and it knows it's a transit reader and just works, no need to even initiate payment.

> Besides the hassle that the paper tickets were (they become unreadable if you look at them wrong)

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 also (next year) want to stop the super easy 1,10 euro per trip (any trip any mode) tariff.

Do you have a source for that?

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