When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
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When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
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Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#2I would love to see more of this mindset - bring something new and unique in to the world, instead of mass produced, least price per unit mentality, like how car colors are trending towards black and white.
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#3Not much to say except it’s a nice collection and I’m glad someone is cataloguing these historical items.
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#4I remember using muni tokens in SF. It was great and I often had a stockpile of them so that when friends/family visited I could give them out to help them get around the city.
Carrying cash/something physical in general to pay for transit has basically gone away. I suspect this has helped ridership but there are a few losses too.
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#5I remember using muni tokens in SF. It was great and I often had a stockpile of them so that when friends/family visited I could give them out to help them get around the city. Carrying cash/something physical in general to pay for transit has basically gone away. I suspect this has helped ridership but there are a few losses too.
Some places it remains - and I do find something cute about the physical train ticket that says NYP NYP that I used just today.
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#6I remember using muni tokens in SF. It was great and I often had a stockpile of them so that when friends/family visited I could give them out to help them get around the city. Carrying cash/something physical in general to pay for transit has basically gone away. I suspect this has helped ridership but there are a few losses too.
When my stepmother died we went through her things and found all sorts of ticket and metro stubs from the year she lived in Paris. I’m saddened by the loss of these ephemera that carry a little story. I went to Radiohead last December and the supposed “memory ticket” was just a flyer basically, with nothing personal about it.
On the other hand, a few years ago I was in Paris and when the metro spit my ticket back at me it blew away in the wind. I suppose there were some downsides…
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#7Having something as mundane as a transit pass be designed so beautifully installs a sense of civic pride. Plus, it employs artists. Both of these things are important for a community.
Transit passes may have been phased out in a lot of places, but there are lots of opportunities for a city to design and display public art.
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#8I would love to see more of this mindset - bring something new and unique in to the world, instead of mass produced, least price per unit mentality, like how car colors are trending towards black and white.
Not for transit please.
This kind of thing is illegible (not to mention inaccessible) for visitors. Someone comes to your city and they want to ride a train instead of driving their rental car into your downtown. Your transit requires a card. They're not comfortable with your language, they have to find a machine, and the first one doesn't work right.
They finally get a machine that works, after standing in line behind several other people. It turns out they need to buy a new special card and then load it with one of a number of confusing products.
They get your pretty card. Then they have to pay attention to where that card is at all times, and buy exactly the right number of tokens to load onto it (potentially). They can only buy tokens in a few select locations in your city, realize they have run out, and end up Ubering for the rest of their trip. Or they have to buy the timed card that expires in four days, halfway through their trip, and remember to get the next one in two days because it's not on sale yet.
We have wallets built into our phones now. Transit is a utility - it should universally take tap to pay, and more major cities are now rolling that out. Zero planning, zero extra "new and unique" objects to keep track of.
If you want a date based pass for a long visit instead of paying per trip, both Apple and Google have a way for you to buy transit passes directly from their wallet. You can always make that virtual card pretty.
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#9> Milwaukee claims to be the inventor of the weekly transit pass
… so, really? In the 20th century? I’m _almost_ certain that the Dublin and Kingstown Railway (1834) did season tickets; remember seeing one once. Even if not that, surely some one did in the century between the invention of commuter rail and the Milwaukee one?
(The Dublin and Kingstown railway, allegedly the first commuter railway in the world, is interesting in that it was clearly designed before people had figured out what commuter rail was _for_; on launch it was every half hour on weekdays… and every 15 mins on Sunday. These days it’s every ten mins on weekdays and every 20 mins on Sunday… But in the very early days there was definitely an impression that using commuter rail was a leisure activity.
It was also extended with the world’s first atmospheric railway, which lasted about ten years before being replaced with something more sensible. Today, Dublin has about four commuter lines, which just goes to show that first mover advantage doesn’t count for much.)
Re: When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
#10I would love to see more of this mindset - bring something new and unique in to the world, instead of mass produced, least price per unit mentality, like how car colors are trending towards black and white.
Not for transit please. This kind of thing is illegible (not to mention inaccessible) for visitors. Someone comes to your city and they want to ride a train instead of driving their rental car into your downtown. Your transit requires a card. They're not comfortable with your language, they have to find a machine, and the first one doesn't work right. They finally get a machine that works, after standing in line behi…
Nothing you say is necessarily wrong or bad, but it is why we can’t have beautiful things and only utilitarian shit.