Paywall 🫠
Journalists trying to make ends meet
Gotta give their landlords an excuse to charge more rent and coffee shops an excuse to charge $6 a cup.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands, trains are so expensive that it’s cheaper to go by car and pay for parking if you going with more than just yourself
Does fare-free also mean tracking-free, or is there still a requirement for a smart card or a phone, with fines for those not carrying one? In Kyiv, the fare tracking application collects history forever, without a retention policy and with a requirement for confirming every cash payment with a full name and phone number, which means municipal IT employees can see where any phone owner was going at any hour today, last month or five years ago. I really hope somewhere in the world systems like these are going away rather than proliferate, actively supported both by municipal government and by local transit rider organization insisting that cash should be banned and riders should start paying a bigger percentage of the fare while taxes go somewhere else.
At least here in Germany (and Austria for the record) there is no automatic fare tracking. You pay for the ticket/monthly subscription and there are occasional controls with significant fines. In inter-city trains much more often than within cities.
I’m controlled on average less than once a year in trams but from what I can remember, basically everyone has a valid ticket still.
