Public Transport - Don't Make Me Think!

🫧 Open on Bubbles

In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them.

It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions.

One of the seminal texts in computer systems design is " Don't Make Me Think ". Every time a service forces the user into making a decision, it is placing a cognitive burden on them. Computers' jobs are to make things easier for us fleshy meatbags.

There are some intractable problems with navigating unfamiliar spaces (looking at you Kyoto Station!) and a transport authority can't publish signs and make announcements in every conceivable language, but there's one thing they can control - ticketing.

Let me take you through some of the public transport ticket experiences I had - and explain how easy or hard they were to use.Basel, Switzerland - free

Upon checking in to our hotel I was given a free Basel Card. It entitled me to free public transport across the city.

Zero extra cost. I didn't have to remember to take a physical card with me - the details were emailed as a PDF directly from the hotel on check-in.

I didn't have to show the bus driver when I entered a tram. If a ticket inspector was present, they could have asked to scan it.

This is close to the platonic ideal of "Don't Make Me Think" public transport. I didn't have to work out zones, fares, or timings. I didn't need to interact with people or machines. I didn't worry that I was somehow doing it wrong and was going to get shouted at.Milano, Italy - contactless

I tapped my credit card on the reader. Whether it was a bus, tram, or metro the process was the same. Tap, wait a few milliseconds, beep. On the metro the gates opened automatically. On the tram, I just sat down after the beep.

The fares have a bit of complexity based on how freq…