Fri, 19 March 2010
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The Netherlands has a reasonably good public transport system, but the payment system is undergoing transformation. Here is a basic guide to tickets, trains, buses, trams, airports and taxis, including information for those with special needs.For national travel, www.9292ov.nl provides a door-to-door itinerary. After delays due to security issues, it will be possible to travel with the new OV-chipkaart (www.ov-chipkaart.nl) in more and more places during 2009 till, eventually, all services should be using this smart-card system.
Cards are issued anonymously or for a particular individual. You buy a pass (or ’load‘ it from a bank account) and swipe the ticket upon entering and leaving the bus, metro, or tram. You pay for the distance travelled, unlike the current zonal system, the paper strippenkart.
With a strippenkart, a journey costs EUR 1.60 for one zone (two strips) and there are discounts for kids and pensioners or for multiple strips (15-45). You can stamp more than one person on a strippenkaart and it is valid for an hour, regardless of transfers between, say, metros and trams. Night buses have a separate strippenkaart.
If your journey includes one or more transfers and one of the public transport companies is not yet ready for the OV-chipkaart, paying by OV-chipkaart means you would pay the boarding rate twice. In this case, it is cheaper to use strippenkaart for the the entire journey.
In most regions, season tickets and strippenkaart will continue to be valid as long as the launch of the OV-chipkaart throughout the Netherlands has not been completed. Afterward, travel tickets other than the OV-chipkaart will gradually be cancelled. This will be announced in time, in the media and by the public transport companies.
Strippenkaarten work by stamping the card, either yourself (in the small yellow machines) or more often by a conductor or driver, at the beginning of the journey. You stamp the card one more strip than the number of zones through which you are travelling. You may also stamp for more than one person on a single card, which will no longer be possible with the new OV-chipkaart.
How would I find maps of the tram systems in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht, etc.??
You can ask for the information in the local city transportation ticket
How can someone, being fully mentally capable, have the nerve to say that the Netherlands have a reasonably good public transportation service??
The trains are a moving - or better - unmoving disasters that anyone can follow on any newspaper regularly. Any leaf or bird makes a whole line be blocked for hours - if not for days; where people speak compulsively loud on their mobile phones about absolutely nothing or something utterly uninteresting that they insist in sharing with every single passenger.
What is the excuse, this time, for someone that walks around wearing an NS uniform being asked for some details on a schedule and the answer is: Do I look like I work for the NS?
Trains, physically, are filthy dirty, the stench can be felt before even stepping in and toilets have never seen a drop of soap.
Trams... (nothing to say about the lines that circulate on the more central areas but try to get a tram that leads you into deep West or East - you're sure to be waiting for at least 20 minutes.
What actually worsens the whole situation is not the fact the company has severe organisational and operational flaws but the fact that is unable to recognise these problems and keeps claiming a premium service.
To top it up, we have taxis... Well, if you think the Camorra is a mean organisation you haven't seen anything!
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