Andere Städte, andere Sitten

July 13, 2007 on 8:27 am | In Miscellaneous |

When you ride a public bus in Solothurn, you will maybe see once or twice a year a tally clerk checking tickets. He wears his normal bus driver’s uniform and can be immediately spotted. Normally, this works very well and the atmosphere is relaxed, an incident with two seemingly illegal African immigrants who verbally confronted the tally clerk and left him emotionally deeply distressed is the toughest situation I’ve ever witnessed.

In Bern, buses and trams are searched by groups of tally men in civil clothing so that the passengers can’t exit unchecked through one door while they enter through the other. However, spotting them is still rather easy: if you see a group of men with mustaches in outdoor clothes chatting at a bus stop, your ticket is going to get checked. Nevertheless, their strategy is very efficient still since everybody is deeply into their iPods or free newspapers when riding the bus.

In Zurich, they set up mobile checkpoints. The checkpoint is suddenly announced as you are approaching the next station. At the station, the bus comes to a complete halt, is being swarmed with tally men for fast ticket checking, and doesn’t travel any further until the search process is complete. If you don’t happen to have a ticket and are taken out of the bus, there are two units of the city police waiting right in your face so you better think twice about acting up.

Zurich once had the same ticket checking strategies like Solothurn and Bern, but they changed them when tally men got beaten up by passengers. In other words, we have here a perfect example of how the attitude problems of some strain the resources of many.