The thing is called OV-chipcard. The system is easy, when you enter the transport zone, a reader at the entrance will check your card and sets the status of the card to “beginning of your travel”. A fixed price of 10 euro is invoiced. When you leave the transport zone, again a reader will set the status to “end of your travel”. The real price is being calculated by comparing beginning and end. The difference between the 10 euro and the real price is added to your credit. If the real price is higher, the difference is additionally invoiced.
The system works on all modes of transport. Busses, Trains, Metro.
It works fine as long as you, the traveler behaves as an ideal component. But alas, we are not.
We get confused by different readers for different modes of transport. Yes, they have different readers, not really by design but by system. Different reading systems in almost identical readers, often placed together at the entrance of transport zones. We, not being the ideal components, easily make the mistake of having the wrong system setting the status on “beginning of your travel” for instance by bus, while we want to travel by train. When you leave the transport zone, the system cannot set the status on “end of your travel”, because the beginning-status was set in a different system. Ooops…and there you go, loosing your fixed rate invoiced at the beginning. And traveling by metro, the sliding doors are linked to a correct “end of your travel” status. Otherwise they stay closed. You can get in but you can’t get out!. And then “Hotel California” of the Eagles starts playing in your head. And I hate the fucking Eagles.
Suppose you find out you used the wrong reader at the beginning, there is no easy way to correct this error. Assuming you would find out. Maybe there is no way at all to correct your error.
But the ticket inspector on the train will find out when he checks your card while travelling. His handhelds do not recognize another status than the one that is correct for traveling by train. This way I found myself in the middle of a conversation with the ticket inspector, who was looking at me as being a deliberate fraud. Showing me his handheld to prove his point. My argument that the system was wrong hardly made any impression. He was also trained to consider travelers to be ideal components. A mistake means fraud, because ideal components only make deliberate mistakes.
There is a website where you can check your travels and the transaction being performed on your OV chipcard. And there is a way to fill in claim forms. If you can find the claim form on the website. I know there is one, because I have used it before. But one way or another it’s well hidden somewhere. Couldn’t find it the other day when I wanted to fill in my next claim.
The principal mistake in the system seems to be that it assumes the consumer to be one of the failsafe components. But we are not. And the system does not interact at all with us, the sleepy, hasty, dreaming people. No feedback, no easy roll back, no interaction while traveling. No human assistance to open sliding doors. This whole system sucks because it was developed to cut costs by treating the consumers as one of the system components. But it’s a fail, one big bleeping fail. It lacks to be trustworthy and it will need a completely new setup to really deliver service to us.
