A couple of Wired clippings of interest

[dewline]

1. This is from September 2016, but I note this for curiosity's sake. I didn't know our Mint did coins for other countries, nor did I know they were in the transit token game, and that where Toronto's moving away from them, Winnipeg's moving towards them.

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/winnipegs-transit-system-revived-old-timey-token/

2. Hoping the documentary this discusses - made by the same people who did Helvetica - gets into the main cinema chains, not just the repertory movie houses.

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/surprising-history-canadas-iconic-designs/

Comments

[thewayne]

My wife and I did a river cruise from Prague to Berlin two summers ago, I padded time in Berlin on both sides of the trip (most people flew in to Prague and out from Berlin, I wanted extra time in Berlin so we took a train to Prague to catch the cruise). Anyway, Berlin has two transit systems: the UBahn and the SBahn, the UBahn is the underground and the SBahn is surface trains/trolleys.

They didn't require tokens. You got a paper ticket from a machine, and it was largely an honor system. I understand they had ticket inspectors on trains doing random inspections, but I never saw them and we were never checked.

It turns out that not being checked was a good thing: I didn't realize that the tickets that we bought were good for three hours, I thought they were all-day passes.

We bought the tickets from Berlin to Prague at an SBahn office who also sold us the tickets to get to the main station for our train. She asked if we wanted guaranteed seating, which seemed like a wise thing to me. The train stopped at the border between the two countries for a crew change, and A LOT of people got on board, going from compartment to compartment asking about open seats. They ended up standing in the aisle of the train or sitting on jump seats in the corridor.

(at that border stop I saw an industrial-type building with Je Suis Charlee graphitied on the side, I thought that was cool)

And our tickets for that train ride were definitely checked!