Dutch Public Transport Digital Payment System (OV Chipkaart) – An Epic Fail Story for Me (and in general imho)

My horrible encounters with the system:
- Today was a pretty darn nippy morning (COLD!!! BrrrrRrRrRrrRrrrr), it’s take me a couple of minutes to get to the station. Arriving there the train was already coming, so I had to pick up pace to get in. When I swiped my card the ******* machine rejected it, WTF. It seemed the card itself had expired with 12 euros of credit still on it. Annoyed by that fact I was confronted with another fail, there wasn’t the opportunity to buy a single way ticket or a new card, WTF! So I had to call my wife to bring me to work. I later discovered that to reimburse my 12 euro credit on the expired card, it COSTS me 2,5 euro administration cost. That would probably be on top of the 7,5 euro which costs a new card.

I quote (sorry Dutch only, no translation available, seems they are lacking in the customer service department):

Defect?
Is uw persoonlijke of anonieme OV-chipkaart defect? In dat geval kunt u vragen om restitutie (teruggave) van uw saldo.
Bij een defecte persoonlijke OV-chipkaart, gebruikt u het formulier Beëindiging en restitutie van een persoonlijke OV-chipkaart.
U ontvangt het bedrag op uw bank- of girorekening (na aftrek van € 2,50 administratiekosten).
Restitutie is alleen mogelijk als er een saldo van minimaal € 5,00 op uw OV-chipkaart staat.

OV-chipkaart gestolen / verloren / defect / verlopen?

- Once I couldn’t check-out (a “wonderful” new feature, didn’t have to do that with the old paper card system) because the check-in/out device failed with a nice error message. Now my ride would cost 4 euros instead of 1,5. I had to wait in line for 20 minutes to get my money back.

- Some of the non-city stations have devices which allow both check-in and check-out. In the city area’s however, there are these small swinging doors you need to get through. One side is check-in, one is check-out. If you, by mistake, end up on the wrong side, you’re screwed! The first time that such a event happened to me my thought was: “no problem I’ll just swipe the card”, which would be OK for the non-city situation. The problem was however, I swiped against the check-out section, which costs me 4 euros, I thought I checked-in (yeah I didn’t look). When I exited from my ride I swiped to get out, for real this time, and again 4 euros disappeared from my card. Considering I don’t regularly use public transportation, I noticed it a couple of days later.

- I also accidentally carried two cards once and couldn’t remember which one I used to check-in. And there’s no way to find that out because the charging machines which show information about the card are behind the check-out. And yeah, I choose the wrong card … :(

- Another issue they experience is that people with a subscription of some sort (e.g. monthly) don’t check-in / check-out at all in trams. As long as they don’t enforce that they will miss out on a lot of valuable data which this system should have supplied.

- There are also issues because some of the transportation companies have different implementations, which for example means that using your subscription card at a specific buss  company would result in loss of credit (hence the card holds both subscription and credit information!) instead of just registering the trip. Plus every company would charge it’s own “administration” fee, thus using different types of public transportation  each being owned by a different company would create an additional cost.

- With this new system people are required to check-out. Checking-in rarely causes a queue, people simply don’t arrive all at the same time, getting out however causes everyone to queue up to get checked-out. Some stations have a limited supply of check-out machines or poorly placed ones. There’s also at least one person in the queue which is unable to check-out and tries repeatedly while holding up the queue, which might be incompetence or plain system failure.

I’m getting really annoyed by this system and even when it isn’t my fault it costs me time and money. Did we (poorly) re-invent the wheel here, I’ve seen much better systems abroad.