Things that trigger me #3: Buying a ticket to buy a ticket

I’m spending much of January and February in Spain and Portugal on a motorsport journalism assignment. Not altogether unpleasant compared to shivering in Austria, I have to say. But one thing that has soured my mood in this part of the world is having my pocket picked by the public transport authorities.

My first stop – and first nasty shock on the city transport front – was in Lisbon. A city in which you cannot just pay for your ride, as you might reasonably expect to do. First, whether you like it or not, you must pay for a travel card onto which credit for actual journeys must be loaded. Fifty cents, gone.

Not a lot of money, I grant you. And probably neither here nor there for a local investing in regular use of the network. But if you’re just passing through, as I was, then all that’s effectively happened is you’ve paid a surcharge for your ticket.  

Even I could live with the fifty cents, if that’s all it was. But that tale’s not done. You need to hear the other deliberately cynical parts. Firstly, you cannot just load the exact cost of a ride. You can only load specified amounts, starting at three Euros. (Why? Is technology not yet smart enough to handle decimal points?) But a ride costs somewhere south of two Euros. And how many rides was I taking? That’s right, one. So with the cost of the travel card and the minimum balance requirement, I had the pleasure of spending €3,50 for a bus ride costing something around €1,80.

You see how the pulse may start to quicken at this point?

And we’re only halfway through the madness.

“No worries,” a reasonable soul might think to themselves despite the gentle bubbling of their blood. “I can surely just go to the transport authority desk at the end of my trip and claim back any unused balance!”

I used to be just such an adorably innocent subscriber to common sense and fairness. But the trouble with this worldview is that you get tired of being proven wrong: of course you bloody can’t claim any unused balance in Lisbon! That’s right: in a world of instant micro-payments and crypto-currencies; a world where people on the other side of the planet can trick you into paying them money from your own bank account; a world where you can wave your watch at a wine bottle and consider the bill paid, a large public transport enterprise shrugs and tells you it’s impossible to hand you a couple of coins or refund your credit card. Yes, really.

So we have this skilfully crafted mix: minimum ‘credit top-ups’ and no refunds for unused balance. This money-making cocktail ensures, of course, that tourists will fly home with unused cash on their tickets. And that even your hard-working grandmother in Lisbon will die with credit on her bus pass. Sure, you could honour her memory by topping it up and taking that last ride, but then you’ll have some random amount left on the card again. But that would only be shifting the probem to your own grandkids, because you’ll never clear that balance if ticket prices don’t add up to the top-up amounts. What a convenient accident for the powers that be.

Small amounts, yes. But there is a moral aspect to this, I feel. When someone is forced to throw away money they’ve spent because it’s locked into a wilfully miscreant system like this one, it’s no different to a shopkeeper holding your change in his fist and chasing you out of the door with a garden rake. And the other, more sickening ethical part? There are thousands of Euros lying around on these tickets, festering away in Lisbon puddles or being discovered in backpacks after landings thousands of miles away. This money, which could be given to charity or feed somebody, just goes to waste. In a world waking up to scarce resources, that’s an outrage.

But it’s all in the name of progress, of course. I don’t doubt for a second that this sordid business is justified as innovative, convenient and probably even environmentally-friendly. When the truth behind this smokescreen – for tourists at least – is that it’s manipulative, takes up more of one’s time than it took grandad to fish out his coins for the conductor, and actually makes one inclined to hire a car rather than use the cleaner public transport option.

Even if I were a local, I’d be objecting as a matter of principle. Generations of my family, going back to my great-grands, were able to pay for the cost of their tram ride, receive a ticket for it, and that was that. Now, in our wonderous, AI-soaked twenty-first century, some enlightened soul at the city comes along and says the system has changed, and now you’ve got to pay for some fancy bit of paper that stores the ticket. Can’t anybody see what’s being done to us?

And so to Madrid. Here I encountered a five-fold increase. The fancy card thing cost €2,50. As in Lisbon, this was compulsory: there was no other way to ride the subway. Then I had to pay for the actual travel, meaning my first metro ride cost a whopping €4,10. The taste that leaves when you’ve just arrived in town is more bitter than a Portuguese espresso. And now I’m just walking everywhere in Madrid, raging about being milked of money that I have to work for but the milkers don’t.

To end, some bits of housekeeping in the interests of rounded journalism:

• In Lisbon’s defence, you are still allowed to buy bus (but not metro or train) tickets using cash. This is good. But of course, in the ongoing crusade to rid the world of paper money, you’re punished and stigmatised for this. They charge more for your cash ride than they do if you zap the little travel card thing on the reader. Which leaves the poor sod doing only one or two journeys confronted by a ton of complex mathematics regarding the financials of investing in a card, further complicated by the fact that it’s really hard to find out what a ride costs until you start zapping readers or trying to talk to impatient bus drivers in broken Portuguese. By which time you’re stressed out and it’s all too late.
• In Madrid, unlike Lisbon, you can at least put the exact cost of a ride on the rechargeable card thing. This is also much better. At least with careful management, a tourist should be able to get the darn card down to zero by the time they leave town. Though ducking into metro stations to find machines to load tickets and then having to resurface to find the bus you wanted to board seems like a waste of several minutes of life in comparison to just handing over some cash when boarding. But I’m just a stubborn Luddite, so what do I know?
• I don’t object in principle to rechargeable cards. I used an Oyster in London decades ago, and it was exactly such a thing. No issue with offering or even encouraging these, particularly for residents. The specific twists that outrage me are forcing card ownership, minimum recharge amounts and being robbed of leftover credit.