Quote:
Originally Posted by spiderplant
It is a little bizarre. You don't go to a ticket office to buy a bus or plane ticket - why should you for a train?
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Unless you’re boarding a driverless bus, every vehicle has a staffed ticket office. I used that ticket office to get into town only yesterday, because the ticketing options offered by both companies serving the route are so opaque it’s just quicker to ask the driver, and there is no cost-effective ‘any operator’ ticket for a simple return journey.
It’s also pretty much impossible to remove humans from the process of checking in for a flight because checked baggage has to go somewhere, so there will always have to be someone staffing check-in and taking money, even if only excess baggage charges.
Which pretty well illustrates the point - the systems require humans to make them work safely and effectively, and always will, no matter how seamless online ticketing becomes (and it is far from seamless on the railways). Even on the Glasgow subway there are an insane number of ticket options for a service that just goes round and round in circles through a mere 15 stops. You really do have to sit down with your calendar and a calculator to work out which one is more cost effective.
I visited a staffed ticket office at one of those 15 stops yesterday and had a nice chat with the man there in order to work out what to buy for our new student. It turns out you can charge up a Young Scot ID card with subway credit to spend on a per-journey basis, but you can’t charge it up with a season ticket, for which you either purchase a plastic card from the ticket man, or else go online and set up an account and get a free one with your photo on it - which clearly costs them more, so they are obviously very keen to push people online. One you have your subway photocard you can buy a weekly, monthly, six monthly or annual travel pass at the ticket office by presenting the card to charge it up … but if you want a 10-week season ticket (most useful to students) then oh, no, he can’t sell you that one, that’s online only. The whole thing is nuts, and while the pricing and incentives are obviously designed to push you to transact online, they are so opaque that perversely they also increase the likelihood that you’re going to want to actually ask a human employee for advice at some point.