I’ve just come back from a week in Brussels, a city that gets so much right, especially its public transport. I enjoyed my time there very much (especially because I got to nerd out about all the European Parliament stuff), but along with the green spaces and good food, the thing that stood out to me most was how easy it was to get around.

As a tourist in Brussels, nothing could be easier than using the trams and buses. There are signs EVERYWHERE showing the routes, and the trams even have electronic boards with little lit-up dots showing you where all the trams on the line are currently at. Finally and most crucially for this blog post, payment was entirely frictionless - as dozens of advertising boards say across the city, “Your bank card is your ticket” . What they mean by this is that contactless is supported - everywhere. To pay for the tram, I could simply tap my debit card on the reader continuously throughout the day, and then once the day was finished, I would get charged the daily cap, or the sum of my individual journeys, whichever would be the better value. User-friendly to the extreme! It made one of the more stressful aspects of holidays, transport, so much easier, and for that I thank Brussels and I thank Belgium.

London does this too, and as do most cities in the UK, like Manchester, Edinburgh, Nottingham, and Southampton, just to name a few. This easy experience just makes the hassle you encounter elsewhere all the more frustrating - other cities are not so lucky. Paris, for example, used to use ‘carnets’ (packs of 10 paper tickets), and if you don’t use them all, sucks to be you. Recently, those were decommissioned at several stations but instead of allowing contactless, you now have to either buy a physical Pass Navigo (come on, Parisiens) or, alternatively, download the buggiest app known to man, IDF Mobilité, which is also absolutely not an acronym I want to have on my home screen. You buy the tickets on the app, and then tap your phone, if your NFC works this time, on the readers.

All of that hassle when you could just support direct payments in the first place.

Strasbourg does it too. While it is a beautiful city, and I absolutely adore trams so it gets a win there, I would have adored them a lot more if I could ‘tap on tap off’. Instead, I was stuck calculating the best combination of tickets to buy for the group, finally settled on some ‘24HR Trio’ tickets, and then had to keep track of the time we first validated the tickets so we knew when we had to buy another one.

Validation - that’s another thing. It makes sense - because tickets are often time-limited to when you first validate them - but having to validate them every time you use them is common across Europe, and an absolute pain. It’s easy enough to do, but I’ve heard horror stories of people forgetting (equally easy to do) and being fined hundreds of euros, despite having genuinely bought the ticket, just because they forgot to tap it on some obscure metal pole in the corner of the train station.

These might all sound like gripes and whines of an entitled tourist, but I think it’s an important aspect which affects how it feels to live and work in a city. Anything that reduces friction to public transport is a good thing as it reduces our reliance on cars, and for those who don’t have cars, Ubers and taxis. And god knows we need to do that.