Geltenden - Valid

Forgetting to validate your Oyster card on London’s transport network will cost you an arm and a leg. At the current arm/leg mid-market rate, £4 is approximately one baboon forearm and a fluffy kitten’s femur. So if you care in the slightest about animal welfare, you’ll do good to remember. Such a high tech system - the Oyster fare card, not the creature limb-based fining - is vastly removed from what happens aboard Auckland’s trains and busses. To use a needlessly porn-based comparison, it’s the crude, primitive whacks-works of Victorian times vs. the imminent six-dimensional hyper-sexploitation flicks of the 2100’s. My (often flawed, if I’m honest) logic dictates the more automated a ticketing system, the less staff are required, thus making the fares sort of cheaper. So you’d think that by having an average of three ticket agents on every single suburban train in Auckland, it’d make getting anywhere more expensive than a cashmere sweater where the wool’s been substituted for actual cash, merely for a terrible pun. Not the case! Like the direction of draining water swirling around local plugholes, so many things are backwards here it can get quite confusing. A twenty-minute train journey from my suburb of Morningside costs $2.80, but if I walk ten minutes up the road to the next station, the price is halved. At the current Pound/NZ Dollar mid-market rate, $1.40 is approximately 61p. It feels wrong to be paying so little for what would be over an hour’s walk and cost about four times as much in England. There’s no machines to buy your tickets in advance, so they have to be bought - cash only - onboard. They’re torn out of a book, then hole-punched; a system the Victorians would at best have considered technologically average. How exactly they manage to keep their army of ticket inspectors employed with such an inefficient system is mystifying. Also, they’re somehow able to afford several Dyson Airblade hand dryers in the toilets at Britomart, the city’s main station. These the same toilets in which they’re expecting visits from intravenous drug users - this evident through all the entrancing ultraviolet lighting. I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate thieving junkie, dangling a $1500 Airblade in my face would be asking for trouble. Especially when I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate clean-freak nutter offered a freshly wall-ripped Airblade for $300 outside the station, I’d definitely take it.

So really for none of this I have cause for complaint: valid tickets for next to nothing and the chance of scoring a state-of-the-art, hospital-grade HEPA filter-housing hand-drying revolution for a bargain basement price. I’ll take that over a bleedin’ Oyster card any day.