DFW, Texas uses DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) and the buses accept cash (exact only/no change, unless you’d like to contribute a donation to subsidize it :D) as well as other tickets and passes, plus they’ve added a smartphone app.
In Montreal, you can pay cash on a bus (exact change only, into a coin counter–no bills) and you get full transfer privileges. The fare cards (OPUS cards they are called) now cost $6 and are valid for 4 years. They do give a somewhat cheaper fare, a quarter I think. Senior cards, which used to give you half fare but now give you a smaller discount cost $15 and are valid for 7 years.
The commuter rail (not light rail; they all use regular train tracks) does not accept cash although there are ticket machines in the stations. Again you can buy an OPUS card for them. But you cannot use the same card as you use for busses and Metro. In fact, if you sometimes use, say zone 2 and sometimes zone 3, you will need two separate cards. And if you have one senior card, it is pulling teeth to get them to issue you one for a different zone. It is an incredibly complicated system, basically caused by the fact that what is on the card is fares, not money. It also costs them since I am most other casual users fill up in December at the old fare before the new one comes into effect in January. It was bought in France, I understand.
Here in Nanjing you can pay cash for the busses, but it’s better to have a Nanjing Citizens Card and use that (you get a slight discount). Oh, there are both air conditioned and non-air conditioned busses, the former cost slightly more.
The subway accepts the same Citizens Card for payment. For case, you have to buy a token at a machine.
While I’ve never tried it, the intercity high speed trains always play announcements that you can purchase your ticket from one of the attendants using cash. I’m not really sure how one would get onto the train without a ticket, however.
Oh, local taxis are also required to accept the Citizens Card, but mostly they try to refuse and prefer cash so that they can avoid reporting the income if you don’t ask for a tax receipt.
Bangkok city buses are cash only.
MBTA buses still take cash, no change given, but the subway doesn’t. It’s possible to catch a train somewhere that doesn’t have a vending machine where it runs as trolley service, but a lot of convenience stores also sell CharlieTickets, so it’s pretty hard to get stranded. The buses also allow you to add cash value to a CharlieCard on the same console where you pay your fare. It’s pernickety and fails a lot, and takes forever, so the driver and other riders tend to get annoyed if you try it.
Commuter rail passes can be bought at a window or a vending machine, or slightly more expensive tickets can be bought with cash on board. There’s an app called mTicket that lets you buy tickets via smartphone with a debit or credit card. The commuter rail uses QR codes instead of RFID cards, so the conductor can scan it off your phone or tablet screen. The harbor ferries take either cash or LinkPasses, which are time limited rather than cash value.
I will add that the default failure mode of the MBTA is “just get on the bus/trolley/train”. Card not scanning? Ticket not reading? Fare machine not working? Just go sit down, there are people waiting behind you. As I type this, it’s 11pm on Independence Day, and all T fares have been waived for the night, starting a couple hours ago. They do it on NYE as well. Someone at some point looked at the logistics of getting what may literally be a million drunk people home after the city-wide celebration, and realized it would be cheaper and less disastrous to just leave all the fare gates open.
In greater Miami, all three of our local county transit systems accept cash aboard the buses. One system even has fareboxes that will issue change for overpayment in the form of a mag stripe bus pass for future use. They even take $20 bills. Wow. The other two systems are exact change only. Or more precisely: you can overpay with coin and/or bills but there’s no refund or credit for the overage.
None of our various train systems take cash aboard. You need a ticket which can be bought at every station using either cash or credit/debit card.
It’d be nice if folks explicitly said which city they’re in. Not everybody knows where the “ABCTA” operates. 
I hated how the Chicago CTS system required you to buy passes at various vendors. That sucked so much as the nearest vendor was about 6 blocks from the apartment I was saying at, and required me to go deeper into the ghetto. Plus sometimes they were sold out.
The other systems I"ve used (especially San Diego) have a kiosk on the bus you can use to buy a pass.
In London (England) you haven’t been able to use cash for about a year now. You use either an oyster card, which you load with money and use as pay-as-you-go or can have a weekly or longer travelcard on, or you pay with a contactless bank card, or you can still use a paper travelcard bought from a mainline train station.
The small problem is that it’s not always that easy to top up an oyster card late at night - the stations will mostly be closed and so will the shops that do oyster top-ups. I’m also concerned about children losing their oystercards/having them stolen/having them malfunction and not having enough money to buy a new oystercard (£5) and top it up with enough money to travel; children are much less likely than adults to have contactless bank cards and because their oystercards give them free bus travel they’re less likely to have planned to have enough money on them to cover the fare.
The same problem could arise for anyone who’s been robbed - it’s much easier to get someone to lend you the cash for a bus fare than the extra money for an oystercard too. I’ve seen people pay for complete strangers’ bus fares on the bus itself before, and have contributed myself, but most people are not going to get off the bus and find somewhere to buy an oystercard for a stranger. You’re not allowed to double-swipe your own oystercard for someone else.
Maybe at some point there will be oystercard dispensing and top-up points near bus stops. I don’t think TFL should have brought in cashless buses till something like that existed.
I agree. The odd time I’ve been caught far from home or with heavy bags and without my Oyster have been frustrating. Make it an even coin amount, make it punitive even but for that one time you’re stuck with no other way to pay…
5% is still a lot. I personally fall into category 3: opportunistic riders. Usually when I’m either on vacation or going to/from an airport. These are situations where I could call an Uber, but if a bus is available I’ll go for that. I don’t have an opportunity to pick up a card beforehand.
Cash sucks due to the exact change problem (I paid for the next 5 riders once). Credit card readers don’t have to be slow and finicky. Heck, I’d be fine even if they only supported NFC cards (tap to pay).
If you are traveling, how hard it is to pack a couple of one dollar bills? If you are capable of packing your toothbrush, you are surely capable of that kind of minimal forward planning.
I’m not trying to be difficult, but our city just required that taxis install credit card readers. It’s awesome, but they are slow, finicky and failure prone. The DC metro system moves 750,000 people every day. Every reception error or declined card is going to have a ripple effect that ultimately makes me late to work.
Since incentivizing SmarTrip cards, my commute has become MUCH smoother. Unlike credit cards, they are designed to do exactly one thing, with minimal points of potential failure. The trade off that transit users have to stop at a CVS at least once in their lifetime seems like a worthwhile one.
In Stockholm you haven’t been able to for quite some time, several years. You’ve got three options: travelcards, single tickets bought from shops or something involving mobile phones which requires signing up to a website. Allegedly it confuses the hell out of tourists.
I’d recommend that Mass Transit Virgins pack a handful of quarters–to allow for fares like the 1.25 base here in Houston. We aren’t a great mass transit city for various reasons–like Tom Delay blocking federal funding for light rail. And I’m not thrilled about the “exciting” new redesign of most bus routes that will be unveiled next month.
Still, it’s pretty easy to pay here. Those quarters will get you on a bus or buy a light rail ticket. But a Metro card is smarter for anyone who might ride more than once. You can reload it with cash, credit or debit cards at the light rail stops–using machines that can* nearly always* read those credit cards. Or reload it on the bus–without annoying the driver; need some unwrinkly bills, though. Or reload the card online.
Plenty of folks who are neither rocket scientists nor brain surgeons handle the system with ease. (NASA is a bit remote–but one Outside The Loop bus *does *go there; the Texas Medical Center is well served but free parking is a perq offered to surgeons.) Is this resistance to buying some kind of fare card snobbery?
In New York City before the debut of the MetroCard the buses were equipped to take $1 bills as well as coins. When they replaced those machined with machines that could read MetroCards, they took away the ability to pull in and read dollar bills, so if you want to pay in cash you have to chunk in $2.75 in coins.
Nope. Our bus system is free.
London seems to be coping with bank cards on buses and tubes and I think we might just have more people using our public transport than in DC.
London accepts payments with NFC (contactless) bank cards, technology that is not in widespread use in the US. Our cards still use magnetic swipes.
There is a pretty extensive bus system here called TCUL that is cash only, and I don’t see that changing for some time. Hereis a typical day. The blue and white vans are privately owned collective taxis called Candongueiro and they can stuff 15 - 20 people into one them. :eek:
Given the traffic and poor conditions expats have a car an driver to get them around.