When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)

> I’m _almost_ certain that the Dublin and Kingstown Railway (1834) did season tickets

Season and weekly are different things (obviously). If you narrow your claim down enough, of course you can be the first (patents or Guinness book of world records being prome examples.)

But the article isn't about that, it's about the design of the tickets. And they are a thing of beauty.

In general we need to free designers, artists, marketing people, engineers, anyone creative really, from the tyranni of spreadsheet, shareholder interests and risk minimization. We're becoming so incredibly scared of any perceived risk that the world become bland. Business are afraid of offending, or not appealing to some group, or in some way hurting the bottom line. Personally we're scared that our homes and cars will lose resell value or that our choices makes us stick out (that is if we're given a choice, because everything we buy must have the broadest appeal).

If you have children, let them pick colours, they aren't yet scared of bold choices and don't needs to explain why your hen house if some weird shade of pink or why that one rooms is a random shade of mint green. They just liked the colour and thought it would be awesome.

This design also serves a business purpose. You can see at a glance if someone has this week's pass without carefully checking the date. Our local bus company does something similar - the day passes have a random word for the day so you can't just print one at home, at least not without colluding with someone who's already bought a ticket.

It reminds me of the logos on https://www.pouet.net/ Each time you reload, there will be a different logo at the top.

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.

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…

Some places it remains - and I do find something cute about the physical train ticket that says NYP NYP that I used just today.

I'd imagine that counterfeit-prevention is part of it. This theory predicts that they changed the design regularly, and each one was significantly different so operators could quickly tell whether it was the new design.

On this topic, I highly recommend the New York Transit Museum

These days we just get repulsive AI slop plastered on everything.