I’m living in Stockholm in Sweden, and as many others I commute everyday to work. I think the system is working OK, but I do believe the technology used to charge for travels is used in the wrong way. There has to be a change in the pricing model as it’s outdated. It does not reflect the year of 2014 and it doesn’t make use of the possibilities that technology today brings. We could have something that is more fair and puts focus on delivering a higher quality service for daily travelling.
It’s rather simple. Today you check-in but you don’t check-out. My suggestion is to do it as in Gothenburg in Sweden you do both. Hence it’s nothing new. What’s new (here) is that when you check-out, there should be an algorithm looking at time of arrival and use that in comparison to what was promised according to time-schedule. If not full filled, you get a discount. Simple. More fair-pricing and requires the traveling company to focus on better quality and improving their service.
There’s probably more attributes you can add to the algorithm. I hope Stockholms läns landsting wakes up and starts to live with the technology, not against it and requires the organization that is responsible for the service to implement something similar.
//Daniel