For decades every town and province in the Netherlands had it’s own public transport company. Each with there own kind of tickets. To travel from one town to an other you sometimes needed three or four different tickets.

About 20 years ago the Dutch government decided that having all those tickets was to much of a hustle and introduced one ticket for the whole of the Netherlands. That is the “strip ticket” could be used in every form of public transport in the Netherlands except for the train. The Dutch railway company kept a monopoly on it’s own tickets.

Now the world is digitizing and so is the Dutch public transport system. At the end of this year everybody using the public transport will have to get an “OV-chip card”. A little plastic card with an RFID chip inside.

The Dutch government has been testing this new card in the city of Rotterdam for close to a year so you might think that most problem should be spotted by now. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The last few months I’ve visited the city of Rotterdam at least twice a month so I decided that I might as well take a OV-chip card an try it out. The Rotterdam public transport authorities (RET) are pressuring people to take one so I applied and within a few weeks I got one over the mail together with some information on how to use it and how the charge it.

To use the OV-chip card you first need to deposit money on it. There are three ways you can do that. You can go to the counter of the RET, pay them and they will charge your card. Or you can go to a kind of ATM machine and use your bankers card to deposit money on the card. The third option is to fill in a form and autorize the RET to take the money from your bank account.

When your card is charged you can travel with every kind of public transport in Rotterdam. When you board a tram, bus or tube your OV-chip card will be credited for 4 Euro’s. The charge is some amount per kilometer. When you leave your OV-chip card will be debited for the remainder of the four Euro’s.

At some point your OV-chip card will run out of money and then you can take one more trip. You only have to charge your OV-chip when the balance is below zero Euro’s.

I chose the ATM machine to charge my OV-chip card . A large yellow metal box with a screen with instructions, the ATM part and a metal basket to put your OV-chip card in. Most of these kinds of machines have some restrained so you can’t take your card out at will. Here there isn’t. The basket is large enough to hold four or five OV-chip cards (maybe more) and there is no restrained. You can take the card out whenever you want. The screen asked me how much money I wanted to deposit. Then it instructed me to swipe my banker card. The ATM part of the machine told me that the transaction had been completed and I took both my bankers card and my OV-chip card and had to run to catch my tube.

Color drain

Do you like my work? Subscribe to See me draw!

When I checked out of the tube I had my first surprise. Instead of 10 Euro minus 89 cents I had a balance of -89 cents. How was this possible. I had just charge the card.

I went to the RET counter to lodge a complaint and was told that thousands of people had already made this mistake. Contrary to every other ATM like transaction with this machine you can’t take the OV-chip card out when the ATM tells you that the transaction is completed. You first have to tell the machine that you want to use the money to charge your OV-chip card. (What else would you want to do with it?) Only then is the transaction completed and can you take you OV-chip card out of the basket. You are in no way warned for this difference in procedure. Even experienced users could make this mistake since people will always be in a hurry. At the end of the year everybody in the Netherlands is going to use this system and millions of people will make this mistake.

But the clerk told me that I could get my money back. I only have to sent a copy of my bank statement together with a complaints form to the RET and I’ll get my money back within six weeks.

Still waiting for my money I’ve been using the OV-chip for the last couple of weeks and I must say that it is a very easy system. The RFID chip is a radio chip. Which means that you don’t even have to take it out of your wallet. You can just wave your wallet in front of  the scanner.

The trouble is that the RET isn’t the only company serving OV-chip cards. The Dutch railway company has also started handing them out. So Thursday I got my new season ticket for the train complete with RFID chip.

I never thought about it. I just put the season ticked in my wallet. What else should I do with it?

Yesterday I had to take the tube in Rotterdam and to my surprise both OV-chip cards where credited for 89 cents! Apparently the scanner can’t distinguish between the two cards.

So I’ve been thinking. What would happen is I would put both cards in the ATM like machine. The basket can hold at least five cards. Could I deposit ten Euro’s on both cards while only having my bank account credited for ten Euro’s. I wonder.