Because this topic came up in c/technology and I was wondering.
Would this be feasible? How bad would it be to your social life?
I’m looking for these scenarios:
-
No smartphone, but have a dumbphone and a computer
-
No phone at all, but have a computer
-
No smartphone, but have a dumbphone, no computer
-
Nothing at all
it’s not even about a smartphone, it’s about being allowed to access services with said smartphone.
when the ticket machine was removed from a train station in rural sweden and replaced with a note on how to buy tickets online, it instantly locked three types of people out: people who don’t have a smartphone, people who don’t have a payment card, and tourists. because it required online verification, you basically needed a swedish phone number and id to buy tickets.
this was about eight years ago, so smartphone penetration was lower, but i still think about the people i met at the train station while i desperately tried to order tickets over the phone and kept getting stuck in their automated phone tree. they were basically stuck there.
Why would they lock out tourists from public transport?
it wasn’t intentional. they just didn’t think about how to implement it. took them four or five years to fix.
I guess it depends on how you needed to sign up to buy tickets, but I bought tickets on my phone in Sweden with my smartphone in Sweden with only a valid email address. The app even had an English mode.
yeah it works nowadays. didn’t when they first introduced it.
And did you have a payment card that worked in Sweden? Or was it not needed?
You needed a payment card of some sort.
Sweden is so backwater in it’s tries to be forward thinking.
You can’t even buy a bus ticket with a visa card (nor cash ofc ofc).
I bought a train ticket at a ticket machine with cash when I was in Sweden last year.
they reinstated the machines on large stations. this one was tiny.
depends on the place. you can in stockholm, but not most places.