Not for transit please.
This kind of thing is illegible (not to mention inaccessible) for visitors. Someone comes to your city and they want to ride a train instead of driving their rental car into your downtown. Your transit requires a card. They're not comfortable with your language, they have to find a machine, and the first one doesn't work right.
They finally get a machine that works, after standing in line behind several other people. It turns out they need to buy a new special card and then load it with one of a number of confusing products.
They get your pretty card. Then they have to pay attention to where that card is at all times, and buy exactly the right number of tokens to load onto it (potentially). They can only buy tokens in a few select locations in your city, realize they have run out, and end up Ubering for the rest of their trip. Or they have to buy the timed card that expires in four days, halfway through their trip, and remember to get the next one in two days because it's not on sale yet.
We have wallets built into our phones now. Transit is a utility - it should universally take tap to pay, and more major cities are now rolling that out. Zero planning, zero extra "new and unique" objects to keep track of.
If you want a date based pass for a long visit instead of paying per trip, both Apple and Google have a way for you to buy transit passes directly from their wallet. You can always make that virtual card pretty.
I don't see how your point contradicts GP's. There is no reason why you can't have a reliable machine that sells a reliable daily or weekly pass with a nice design. The rest of your comment about Ubers seems to be just a massive straw man.
Tap to pay may work if you actually use your phone as your wallet. From what I see around me, most people don't. And on this website in particular you have surely seen people advocating for cash over privacy concerns. Nor would I be confident that my card will work flawlessly in another city half a planet away before I get there. I will buy a weekly pass from a machine, though, especially if it looks cute enough that I can bring it home as souvenir.
> Travel somewhere else for business or pleasure
> Insist that everything work indistinguishably from how it works at home
Not gonna make it
This reads like a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to buy a ticket from A to B. It’s really not that complicated in most countries with functional public transport.
The way I see it there is a bifurcation here: some people value convenience so they just use their regular credit card to pay per trip with no discounts; others don’t mind the mental overhead of getting a transit card, understanding the fare products, selecting the optimal fare products, standing in line to load the fare products onto the card in order to save money. It’s good to provide both.
Nothing you say is necessarily wrong or bad, but it is why we can’t have beautiful things and only utilitarian shit.
Some things should be a utility. Nice is important but transit should fade into the background while you live life. Don't make them ugly but utility needs to be first.
Well, some people spend a significant amount of their time on transit. Of course, utility should come first, but I also would totally support trying to make them look nice (even if most people wouldn't notice nowadays because they stare at their phones the whole time).
Utilitarians see the utility of everything and the value of nothing.
You can have lots of beautiful things. You can't REQUIRE beautiful things. Government services are a requirement.
Thinking like this is exactly what's wrong with public transport in most of the world. It has to be there, but god forbid you make it actually attractive, then people might use it more and it would cost even more. Better to keep it at a barely tolerable level and save the money for what really matters, like road projects.
You can't REQUIRE beautiful things.
Sure you can.
At least in the United States, there are many state and local laws requiring a certain percentage of the money spent on building projects be dedicated to making them look good, and to putting art inside them.
One example of many: https://sfca.hawaii.gov/art-in-public-places-program/percent...
Usually it's public projects, but often it's both public and private construction.