> Upon seeing this, the experienced visitor to this sceptred isle knows to smartly turn on their heel because B45 is right behind them, but we occasional travellers don't.

Railways aren't much better. German railways are bad enough, but Eastern Europe... good luck even finding a realtime track schedule, and screw you if you don't speak the language. Last time in Rijeka there was construction going on but no indications anywhere, my fellow travellers were lucky I spoke Croatian and recognized that the attendant was shouting in Croatian for the people on what should have been a train...

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ghaff an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Railways--and public transit generally--is optimized for people who speak the native language and use the system regularly and more or less ignore the jet-lagged person just off a flight who doesn't speak the language. In general, a lot of systems do a bad to terrible job of accommodating people who are unfamiliar with them.

It also doesn't help when so many countries (and even cities) have totally different systems for paying, etc. Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others. And, no, having to scour guidebooks (of possibly outdated info), for all the right incantations for a given locale isn't really satisfactory.

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starky 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

>Contactless payment is simplifying some of that. But you still, for example, have the need to tap out in some places but not others

The tapping out thing can be so confusing, even as someone that uses transit a lot. I was traveling recently and encountered buses where you had to tap in only, ones you had to tap in and out on, and ones where you had to tell the driver where you were going before tapping in. None of which had clear signage on the bus itself.

Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home.

	▲	ghaff 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Even with my home system, at the airport I noticed they had installed extra stickers covering up the wrong way gates, and I had to tell someone where to tap their tickets when their entire family was blocking my way to the platform when trying to get home. My observation is that's improved a lot. But I remember I was traveling somewhare on UK trains, and between receipts and tickets for trains after a change, I had this sheaf of cards that my friend and I were rifling through to get on a train (with a short connection) and it wasn't at all obvious what we needed to feed into the turnstyle with people getting annoyed behind us.

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lifestyleguru an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You come to Croatia for cheap holidays and are surprised not all works as you're used to.

German service providers absolutely don't care if you don't speak German and will take that extra step to make sure you get the message.