In the old days, if you wanted to buy a ticket on a bus, you paid the driver. Or, you bought a ticket at a bus stop and validated it.
Then technology gave us more options. These were fully implemented when “the pandemic” came. You no longer had to enter the bus from the front. In fact, in many countries it was forbidden.
This led to payment points throughout the bus. In Cluj, you can buy a bus ticket through any entrance, with almost any bank card.
Not so in other countries. In most places in Europe (including Brussels and Tallinn, as we understand) you still need to buy a bus card.
What is wrong with that, you ask? Well, there are fewer stops where you can buy transport cards. This means people are more likely to ride without paying. Not because the price of a ticket is too high, and not because there are too few guards. Just because it is too difficult to buy a ticket.
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” said Gabe Newel, of Valve. Sure, he was talking about illegal game downloads, and not illegal rides. And he wasn’t talking about Cluj, he was talking about another part of Eastern Europe.
A Cluj expat had this to tell. “I never ride on the Cluj transport without paying. Okay, I did underpay once, when I didn’t realise you had to press “Save” or whatever to validate a second passenger. But in other countries, in other cities, sometimes it is just too difficult to pay. Sure, Cluj transport is cheaper.”
It got boring after that. The moral of the story is that the easier you make it to pay, the more likely people will pay.
We surveyed expats, and it does seem that most people want to pay for their rides. Everyone we spoke to, in multiple European countries, made an effort to pay for their transport. One wanted a refund when she bought a ticket that she didn’t use. But no one reports intentionally riding on Cluj transport without paying.
We have heard a couple people talk openly about piracy, however. Their usual excuse seems to be the low quality of the product. Why waste time on the media that is too bad to pay for? We still don’t have an answer to that.