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| Almere Muziekwijk station (photo EU-Digest) |
The problems become even more complicated when one wants to make use of the special 40% discount on train travel outside of morning rush hours.
This card has to be activated to be used as an OV-chipkaart. To do so you must make an account at the OV-chipkaart website. The sentence 'activating the card' means 'buying a product in the webshop'. You 'buy' the product called 'activate my chipcard'.
But then the card is still not active. You have to 'collect your product' at a ticketing machine or service desk.
The result is that many elderly people no longer travel on buses, trains or trams, as they find, buying and charging an anonymous card too complicated.
We're talking about a user group of travelers who are not very computer literate, and we're asking them to virtually transfer money from their account to a card, where some are not even used to making a withdrawal at an ATM machine with a debit card.
One can expect that very few of this group which is continuously growing larger will be activating their personalized "OV-chipkaart, if the system and the activating process remains as complicated and unfriendly as it is today.
What one can describe in politically correct terms is to make it possible that 'technology averse' people or tourists should be able to simply go to a 24 hr. service desk and get help to activate their card.
Especially also for those people for whom public transport is their only way of getting around.
As it stands now, the Dutch OV-Chipkaart is not user friendly and certainly too costly and complicated for local users and tourists
It is high-time something gets done by the Netherlands Ministry of Transportation about this "OV-Chipkaart" disaster.
EU-Digest
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