Opencard Could Be Scrapped
by Sam Beckwith
The City of Prague’s Opencard system has proven so unpopular with Praguers that “there is talk of stopping the project,” according to iDnes.cz.
Introduced last year, at a cost of around 800 million crowns, the smartcard was intended to replace public transport tickets and can also be used as a library card, a way of paying parking fines and as an access key to the City of Prague website.
But after attracting 300,000 users within a few months of launching, the Opencard has failed to catch on and currently has only around 360,000 users.
Counters that issued Opencards are now unstaffed, iDnes.cz reports, while some of the card-readers installed in metro stations are broken and haven’t been replaced.
City officials are reportedly looking at new ways to make the Opencard more appealing, including extending it to the national rail network and using it as a micropayments system, but might also scrap the project.
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October 27th, 2009 at 11:11 am
It’s not like these morons don’t have a working model to follow. I lined up for one of the Open Cards, only to find that you have a convenient choice of 2 places in all Hobbiton to buy credit for it, during the convenient hours of 9-4 or something. You can also use a bank payment, evidently, although my bank doesn’t support it.
It’s funny, because I have an Oyster card I use every time I go to London… Weird how a city 10 times bigger can somehow manage to make a system like this work without any evident troubles.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:42 am
It could be attractive if it is linked to one’s bank account so that it serves tri-purpose 1. for transport, 2. for library, and 3. for use as a visa or credit card.
There should also be a way of verifying the recharge date on the card, not all people would like to memorize this date, for instance the recharge dates could be verified in the ATM machines. The small paper-card attached might not be necessary since one might find it much of a task to be writing some numbers from a sheet of paper onto the small paper-card and not only that but the task of keeping it safe with the open card without squeezing, etc.
Finally, the photo on the open card could be colored photo and not black and white. This way I think it could pull a high demand.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:49 am
[...] a national holiday here in the Shire. To celebrate, the city fingerbangers are considering scrapping the Open Card system – an abortive little attempt to make the local public transport ticket system make sense. As [...]
November 6th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Wow… I’ve used my opencard for almost a year, buying 90-day tickets each time. I buy the new one online at the e-shop (admittedly hard to find, it’s here: http://eshop.dpp.cz, czech only but mostly navigable without knowing much Czech – google translate is your friend). When I need to know how much longer I have, I put it into the red machine at the metro station and it tells me when it expires.
How is that hard or inconvenient?!