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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

And for visitors who may not even speak the primary language, public transit is awful in most places in terms of onboarding jet lagged visitors. Apparently no one does UX trials of people who have zero familiarity with the system and don't speak the language--though at least they maybe accommodate major Western languages. But, in general, it's pretty awful and you at least should do some research in advance.

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Can confirm.

I usually do a decent amount of research about public transport in our travel destinations, so I more or less know what type of tickets or passes I'll be buying ahead of time.

But, last fall a flight cancellation left us with an unexpected day in Amsterdam.

I guided our family through immigration and customs after an overnight flight from Canada, and then purchased what I thought were the correct tickets for our train ride from the airport to downtown.

When we went past a card reader, it didn't seem to work, but there were no turnstiles and we were able to board our train.

There were however turnstiles when we got off at the station downtown, and they wouldn't let us through.

I walked over to an attendant at a podium, who looked at our (incorrect) tickets, our obviously sleep deprived selves and children and just laughed, told us we'd bought the wrong tickets, and let us through.

I always imagined the world of high-stakes metro-related international criminality would come with more consequences than being good-naturedly laughed at by a Nederlandse Spoorwegen employee.

The same thing happened to me and my buddy in February.

Turns out that an “Amsterdam region” ticket does not get you back from The Hague.

We too got stuck behind the turnstiles, bewildered. We called for help through one of those intercom pole thingies and they buzzed us through.

As someone from Texas, the idea that a city 40 miles away might be in a different region hadn’t even crossed my mind :)

I agree that vending machines are really a mess. However I recommend the Deutsche Bahn Navigator App. If you have an account you can easily get most tickets.

Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through.

I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.

but the new ticket is really nice wrt booking.

I was just in Amsterdam. One of our locals there said that, although there's an ongoing switch to just tapping contactless credit cards, he advised just getting a contactless transit chip card because even if it cost a few dollar more it would more reliably work everywhere. Things have improved in most places over time but it can still be confusing for the occasional visitor.

I remember at some point pre-pandemic I was in the UK with a friend and we had all these these different tickets/receipts were trying to use to go through a turnstile and doubtless really pissing off the people lined up behind us but it was super-unintuitive what we needed to stick into the machine.

The UK has since simplified that into one ticket, possibly also a receipt of you ask for it.

Prior to this, the ticket and seat reservation were seperate bit of paper.

Yeah, it seemed better last time I was traveling there as I recall.

The company that runs the DB system (HAFAS) provides this system for half of the European railways though. And, interestingly enough, also for BART.

https://www.hacon.de/unternehmen/

Their codebase has to be a wild ride. There are still traces from the days it ran as Windows binaries in CGI fashion (very much doubt they still do it like that, just like a large number of eBay URLs still contain the ebayISAPI.dll bit from the time the site was literally a Microsoft IIS plugin). On the DB instance it also outputs like five different generations of UIs depending on the exact parameters you hand it. You can also find several different iterations of APIs, like one search API will output actual, non-trivial JS code to fill auto-completes, another gives you JSON with a totally different format and yet another XML with everything slightly different again. From their job postings it follows their backend is C++.

The previous system came from the 80s and ran on multiple Tandem/Nonstop clusters.

It remembers X.25 networks.

As far as I am aware, although the system is very capable it started as someone's PhD thesis in the mid 80s and has been developed since then.

I worked on the data prepartion for a small HAFAS installation at one point and the specification was an absolute mess of fixed with text, delimited text and XML, sometimes all in the same file!

<off-topic> I couldn't stop giggling for 5 minutes straight after hearing the name of this system. Brilliant!

> I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.

You can just swipe your phone (Apple Pay / Google Wallet) or credit/debit card to check in and out (do not forget to check out!) and you're done. Works for all public transport in the Netherlands.

Of course there are also more traditional ways to pay for your ticket, but it does not get much simpler than this imo.

Doesn’t work in Rotterdam last I tried(October last year)

In my experience the TVMs in Berlin were fine, but it was easier to just get the app because I don't make a habit of carrying around a ton of cash. The biggest problem I had was the TVMs at the Frankfurt airport, half of which were broken, and none had a clear explanation of what the different ticket types were.

I will given Berlin credit here — after checking in to our accommodations (took a taxi from the airport), I poked a ticket machine, quickly saw the Union Jack flag and got the machine into English. Couple minutes later we had our 1 week passes in hand. In general I found the system very approachable, using google maps for route planning.

Oh, as long as you stay within a transportation region you are fine (mostly). Problems start when you want to travel across transportation regions...

It is ok, but still a far cry from London for example, where you simply hold your card while entering and it automatically gives you the best price for your account. So if you drive around a lot as a tourist you just cap at the weekly price once you reach it.

If you tried that in Germany there would be a legal challenge on the grounds that a system which knows where the user travelled infringes on privacy :D

With the caveat that the cap is always a fixed Monday to Sunday period, so if your stay doesn't align with that, you'll get to pay an additional capping period.

Every transit system should have a “tourist day pass” that is moderately expensive but allows you to use anything for 24 hours or so.

Integrate it into my visa (stamp).

I’m also surprised airports don’t integrate it into their passenger fees and boarding passes. But maybe that’s getting a little too multi-modal to handle.

Depending on what I'm doing I often don't want to pay a lot for public transit because I won't use it much. And often don't even get a stamp, e.g. going to the UK from the US.

Very impractical on some routes, no one is even going to look at your passport in Schengen area flights.

Most visitors don't need visa stamps in their passport.

Depends where you go and where you're coming from. Just a matter of time before it's all RFID'd into the passport or access is granted to to the central db to random transit cops.

City passes are mostly a lousy deal unless you're zipping here and there all day every day. Pay per use is almost always a better deal but you need to know the particulars and get the right card/amount.

True, but I often find them worth it to not have to worry about buying appropriate tickets for every journey when I'm a tourist in an unfamiliar city. And on many transit systems, the options seem to be, "Be a local and get an affordable pass or reloadable card, buy individual tickets for every journey, or be a visitor and buy a moderately more expensive tourist day pass."

This is extra true if you're traveling with a family including kids, as I often am.

That’s the whole point. Tourists won’t really care if they spend more than they have to, and they don’t have to worry about it at all. Regulars and the price conscious will go the cheaper route.

Tourists will often just take taxis. Why fool around with figuring out the particulars of the local mass transit for a few trips over a short time.

Last time I was in Copenhagen I asked at the hotel desk how to get to the airport on public transit and the guy said just take a taxi it will be faster and much easier for you.

It depends on the city and where you're staying. Heathrow to much of central London can literally be about $100 cheaper on the tube and just as fast if you just have carryon luggage during normal times of the day. (Don't remember the situation last time I was in Copenhagen.)

I agree that tourists in an unfamiliar city will often just take a taxi by default though.

Yes like in london.

I bought a 24h pass at 8pm, only to find out it's 24h only if you buy it at 00.00, because they all expire at midnight.

They are basically running a legalised tourist scam over there. I can imagine hundreds of thousands of people falling for this.

In London, aren't you pushed towards using a contactless credit or debit card?

(They expire at 4am, though the point remains.)

Oyster cards still seem to be pretty common though I think you can use contactless credit cards in a lot of situations these these days.

Commuters with monthly or longer tickets will need to use an Oyster card, but anyone with only weekly, daily or individual tickets is fine with a contactless credit card.

I think only foreign tourists who don't have a credit/debit card, or whose banks levy a high, fixed charge per card transaction, or who are eligible for some other discount (foreign children age 5-17) should buy an Oyster card.

I'm sure tourists are aware of all this tricks in the first 30 minutes that they are in london /s

> but anyone with only weekly […] tickets is fine with a contactless credit card

1. The weekly capping always runs Monday to Sunday, so if your stay doesn't align with that, you'll get to pay an additional capping period, in which case buying a weekly travelcard aligned with your stay will likely be cheaper (as long as you know which zones you'll mainly require).

2. Having a travelcard gives you the ability to buy slightly cheaper rail tickets for destinations outside of the TfL zones. Pay-as-you-go doesn't, unless you physically get off the train in order to touch in/out at the boundary.

3. Transit nerds only: Pay-as-you-go is subject to certain maximum journey times. If you'll exceed those by staying to long within the system, you'll be presumed to have forgotten to touch out and will be charged a maximum fare. A travelcard avoids that issue.

In Rome, you can now just tap contactless payment cards (/ smartphones, I assume) to readers in buses/ at underground stations. Huge step up from the previous system, which was based on buying paper tickets from newsagents.

But now Italian newsagents don’t get to laugh at us pronouncing the ‘g’ in biglietti. Makes me feel a bit nostalgic/sad for some reason.

The "g" is pronounced (in a sense). In Italian, the digraph "gl" represents a single sound /ʎ/, which is distinct from the sound represented by "l" alone (/l/)

I think having tickets at all is antiquated. In the Netherlands, there are terminals at the stations you tap your bank card against to "check in". When you get off, you tap it again at that station and your card gets charged. Sometimes the conductor comes around with a device to make sure people have checked in.

If you don't want your travel to be associated with your bank account, you can get a chip card which can be topped up using cash.

I have about half a dozen different ways to get from one train station to another, some with first and second class options. Just tapping in and out would not be sufficient to find out how much I have to pay or in some cases which company to reimburse.

For that reason before tapping in, you can select the correct class and discount in the app.

So you don't just need a card. You also need an app. Which I seemed unable to setup when I was last in the Netherlands.

So after a quick google it seems that the only thing is does is "automatically" calculate the price based on start and end of your trip. I put automatically in quotes because you have to stamp in/out every time you switch trains and it pre fines you for not doing it correctly the moment you use it. I think I prefer just being able to select the correct ticket ahead of time.

Systems where you have to checkout are always problematic in my view. Huge queue because one terminal is broken etc. lead to maxed out fares and unhappy customers.

Germany had it for a while (TouchPoint) but they gave it up thankfully — although I don't know the exact reason it was given up.

Like the SFO airport that uses the internationally recognized train symbol for the tram to the garage, and the not-recognized-anywhere BART logo for the train to the region's principal city.

What language should they accomodate? Internationally the "standard" is just local language + English. Should they choose Spanish? If they wanted to choose the language with the most speakers they would rightfully choose a dialect of Chinese.

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