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…
Yes, the author misunderstood something, you definitely don’t need an app. I regularly buy tickets, and I’ve never even installed the bloody app. The two-ticket system is annoying, though, and it’s the kind of mistake a tourist could easily make in good faith. (Taking the tram with a metro ticket, for example.)
… Ah wait, I thought they were talking about the metro or bus+tram tickets, but they seem to be talking about the RER tickets instead ? That’s another issue.
Aren’t they talking about the Transilien trains? Whatever it’s a Paris fail having so many routes on different tickets.
while i was in paris the RER tickets had been folded into the metro tickets but i think that’s more recent. i was there in april
Oh you’re right, I forgot that they changed the system for the RER. You used to be able to access the RER with a “normal” metro ticket as long as you stayed inside Paris, but for the suburbs you had to buy a ”destination” ticket which costed more or less depending on the length of your trip. I wasn’t certain whether that system had completely disappeared.
to be fair, i did stay within central paris. I’d heard the system had been updated as I described and I didn’t see anywhere to buy RER tickets but you’re right to call me out, i did post this without double checking :)