Milan Transport Carnet
In the last year or so, Milan’s public transport system has moved to electronic ticketing, eliminating the old plain-paper tickets.
My usual purchase was the carnet [car-NAY], a booklet good for ten rides. This has now been replaced by a single ticket with a machine-readable magnetic strip, but it’s still good for ten rides and is still called a carnet:
So far, so good. It tells you exactly what it is and there’s an arrow at the top to indicate which way it’s supposed to go into the machine. All nice and easy.
The problem is on the back:
Each time you use it, the date and time of the start of your trip is printed on the back, in case a controllore (ticket taker) wants to check that you’re using the system legitimately. It’s also useful for you, because the ticket is good for 75 minutes of riding on any part of the Milan transport system (including buses and trams), in any combination that includes only one entry to the metro system.
When you have ten trips printed on there, you know the ticket is used up.
However, the trips are printed so small and close together that I, with my middle-aged eyesight, have trouble counting how many I’ve already used. I always end up putting the ticket into the machine and getting the flashing red light and hideous “rejected!” beep to be sure. Then I crease the ticket (as you see in the photos above) to remind myself it’s finished, and start a new one (if I’ve had the foresight to purchase another in advance…).
Solution: The machine obviously knows how to keep count, and it looks to me as if there’s just about enough room for to print a sequential number along with the date and time and whatever that 9-digit code is. How about numbering the trips I’ve taken so I can tell at a glance when I’ve used up trip number 9 and it’s time to buy a new ticket?
If you could also print a little larger, so that I can see how much time I’ve got left to complete my trip, that would be a bonus – do you really need all 9 digits of that code?
Now that I look at it closely, something’s going to have to change in this numbering system in a few years: they’ve only allowed one digit for the year.
I think Milan will move to something like the “oyster” – London uses a pre-pay microchipped card that we can top up as needed. So we can’t see any trip history on the card, but each time we use it at the station we can see how much money is left on it on a screen at the turnstile. If you didn’t on your last trip, then you’ll see in July
An important difference between the old carnet and the new version, a difference that has received very little publicity: the new carnet is personal. The old carnet could be (and often was) shared between a group of people going out on the town: but no more. An attempt to use the card more than once in the same Metro station (within a short period of time) causes the carnet to be rejected. Haven’t tried it on the tram or bus though, because hardly anyone bothers to timbrare, but you have to in order to pass the gates of the Metro.