In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design…
The article is either outdated or the author just didn’t bother to do their research. In Riga you don’t have to scan the QR code, you can just enter the vehicle number of the bus/tram etc. In Melbourne you can get Myki on your wallet app without any prepayment.