One thing about London, and two about Italy, that kind of creeped me out

[xiphias]

Of course, not everything in Europe was wonderful.

London: is there any square inch of London you can be in where you're NOT being taped by a closed-circuit television? MAN, that's creepy. How do y'all get USED to it? I really loved the city, but I couldn't live there, just for that reason alone. WAY too much surveillance. Just. . . creepy, man. Orwell was a Brit, after all. . .

Italy: um. Doors that need a key to unlock from the INSIDE. See, I guess it's just a cultural difference, but, here in the United States, we have this thing called "fire". . . sometimes we accidentally get "fire" on our buildings, and then we need to get out of the buildings. And so, we like to be able to get out of buildings pretty easily. So we do things like have doors that you lock and unlock with a key from the OUTSIDE, but, from the INSIDE, you just use a knob or something, so that you can get out easily.

Freaked me out some, it did.

The other thing that I didn't quite get was the caribinieri. There's something creepy about having your civilian policing done by your military. I just don't like it -- rubs me the wrong way. They seem like perfectly nice, competent people (and the impression I was getting is that they're among the ONLY competent authority figures around -- c.f. my story about the woman fainting on the train to get an idea about the competence of all non-caribinieri first responders in Rome. . . ), but still -- the military is the military and the civilian is the civilian and it seems kind of worrisome to have one group do both.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on all points.

For what it's worth, Boston recently moved to the "Charlie Card", which is pretty much exactly like an Oyster card, except we don't tap out.

We used to have simple token-operated turnstiles, and we spent millions of dollars to upgrade.

Did you know that there is absolutely zero improvement from a user perspective from using a card than a token? I mean, I STILL can't figure out WHY we switched.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I find Oystercards easier than the old paper tickets; it is a little bit faster and this means less crowding in rush hour. Also the plastic Oyster cards are much more durable than the paper tickets, which means they don't get munged so easily in pockets and so on. With paper weekly and monthly season tickets I was forever having to get the gate attendant to let me in and out because even keeping it in a little plastic wallet, I managed to wreck the paper ticket enough that the machines would not read it.

I can't compare to the token system you were using as I have never used it.

[ceo]

So they don't have to maintain the obsolete token machines any more, of course. It is also quite convenient to be able to load a bunch of subway fare onto your bus pass.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

What made the token machines "obsolete"?

Re: Smile!

[ceo]

The fact the nobody makes them anymore, and they're complicated mechanical beasts that required a lot of maintenance.

I have my own complaints about the way the T implemented automated fare collection, mostly related to the execrably badly designed UI on the fare machines and the one-coin-at-a-time fareboxes on the buses.

[ron_newman]

Charlie cards allow for free transfers from subway to bus, and 45-cent transfers the other way (so either kind of trip costs $1.70). That was impossible to implement with the tokens.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Is that benefit worth the hundreds of millions of dollars we spent on the system? What if we'd changed to $0.85 bus and $0.85 subway fares?

Was there any reason we COULDN'T have done that -- making subway fare cheaper to match the bus fare? If we CAN do $1.70 bus+subway rides WITH the added overhead of the new system, why couldn't we do $0.85 each WITHOUT it?