I recently purchased a train ticket online for a trip wholly within Sweden from Swedish Railways, SJ. The terms and conditions came in an English version, and I note the following:
‘Terms and conditions of purchase and travel
The ticket is non-transferable. On the journey, you need to show a valid ID document (passport, Nordic driving license or ID card, national ID card from an EU country or the Migration Agency’s LMA card that shows that you are an asylum seeker).
The covering email also states:
‘If you can’t show the ticket digitally, you can print it and take it with you on the journey. It’s not possible to print at the train companies’ service points.
The tickets are personal and only valid together with an ID document.
Have a nice journey!
SJ’
So in Sweden, you can become a fare dodger (i.e. a criminal) if you don’t have some form of State ID on you even if you are using a train ticket that you have paid for in full.
How long before our exciting new government finds this a useful way to limit movements, although some might think that in the UK, if you do have a passport, as a regular citizen, you soon won’t be allowed on a train in case you go somewhere nice or go to meet people of a like mind. Either way, it is a sinister development.
My objection to the original ID Card idea was that although I could see its advantages, on the downside was mission creep. It was said that you would not have to have the ID card with you all the time… but how quickly would the police find that not carrying the card was suspicious and give you a hard time?
The police don’t seem to respond well to government direction they don’t like – so I don’t think we should give them any more opportunities.
Come to the US, and you get to deal with the TSA. (The Transportation Security Administration, part of Homeland Security. Orwellian.)
We’ve all had to go through the drudge of applying for “Real ID”, for which you need to bring in original docs such as passports, SS cards, birth certificates, etc, in order to get an ID that will enable you to fly in the US.
Unless you’re an illegal alien, in which case you will be able to fly using only your border bail receipt.
We cannot fly without onerous ID, but we can vote. Somehow this doesn’t make me feel safer.
Sweden is regularly reported to be one of the countries furthest down the ‘cashless society’ road, so purchases of travel tickets there are already likely to form part of a person’s Big Brother database anyway, irrespective of whether they present ID with their ticket or not. The real question is why, given that, they should still require ID to be shown. Just another deliberate inconvenience to further rub into citizens their subservient status and remind them that the State is their master and not their servant.
Notice also that here in the UK, an increasing number of public car parks (a) no longer provide a cash payment option (indeed, sometimes not even a card payment option: no smartphone with the relevant app on it? Then you are an ‘unperson,’ you backward old fossil. You’re not parking your car here!), or (b) require you to key in your vehicle’s number plate details, thus disallowing you from passing on your already-paid-for-but-unused time to someone else, or (c) all too often, both. It’s already very difficult to move around in anonymity.
The price of being able to access everything and everyone is that you are part of the everything and everyone.
The ticket is “non-transferable” under the terms and conditions. That’s why they ask for ID, to ensure that the purchaser is the one travelling.
Henry:
Why do they want to know? Why should they care? So long as they have been paid for the ticket, why should they want this information?
What are you supposed to do if your only national ID is issued by a non-EU country such as the UK or US, or even by (Sweden’s neighbour) Norway?
JohnK, ever heard of the free-rider problem? People will get on for short trips and evade the ticket inspections. Here in the UK a lot of rural stations don’t have any access control, you can walk in and out without showing a ticket. Train tickets are often valid for multiple services, so that a passenger can board any train headed in the right direction and can embark and disembark several times. But as a result, it’s also possible for someone to buy one ticket and then hand it over to someone else to use.
The free-rider problem is getting worse in the UK. For example, a lot of bus drivers are having trouble preventing people from boarding without paying. They’ll do things like present fake passes for a split second, just push past other people who are paying, etc. They’re counting on it being too much hassle for the driver to go and check. Then there’s the oldest trick in the book, buying one valid pass between two or more people and passing it out of the window. Non-transferable, ID-linked tickets are intended to tackle such problems.
Of course part of the reason there are more “free-riders” than there used to be is unfair ticket prices. Government intervention to fix ticket prices has, predictably, led to perverse outcomes. It used to be that you could buy a ticket to go a few stops and ticket prices would rise relative to distance. E.g. a ticket for 3 stops might be 50p, a ticket for 7 stops £1. Now the price stages are much flatter – on my local bus route there used to be about 9 or 10 price stages, now there’s just 2. It costs £1.30 to go just down a few stops, and it costs £2.00 to go the end of the route but it also costs £2 to go just half the route whereas it used to cost just £1.20 (and £2.40 to go the whole route). Naturally the bus company has costs and if it cannot charge more than £2 for a single ticket then it will find ways to make money on the other, shorter journeys. But this has made it unreasonably expensive for a lot of passengers.
I recently did a “back of the envelope” quick and dirty calculation on what the bus company must be making on the local service, using some knowledge I have of the bus industry costs I had from a previous job and my own observations of passenger numbers, etc. I thought they’d probably be making money hand over fist but actually I came to realize that my local route, the most heavily used bus route in this area, probably loses money. It is well-known for being one of the few routes that doesn’t get any public subsidy because it makes money. Just goes to show how totally insane public transport in the UK has become, and why the free-rider problem might be a very serious problem indeed for public transport operators.
Passport, as it says in the original post’s excerpt of the terms and conditions.
Alex:
I don’t believe for a second that that is the reason for this policy.
Alex
JohnK is absolutely on the money. The problem there is dishonesty, not passports. If the train company wants to ensure that only one person uses a ticket, it could ask for e.g. sight of the payment card used to buy the ticket, to confirm that the ticket holder bought it. But even then, there is a broader issue. In contractual terms, if A buys a ticket on train company Z’s train and hands it to B to use instead, what is Z’s loss? Nil. If I buy a bottle of wine and share it, should the vineyard get an extra payback, or just the liquor store? The train company suffers no loss if I somehow get off half way to Stockholm and hand over my ticket to Benny or Björn. Granted it has the right to set its terms, but why State-mandated ID? At the very least, a student ID card could prove identity for many.
The answer to the ‘free-rider’ problem in the UK is that people can break the law with little or no consequence.
On the other hand, if you buy a train ticket in the US over the net and fiddle it somehow, AIUI, the Feds might come after you for ‘wire fraud’ and you’d face a 30-year sentence on top of whatever else, just for using the internet for nefarious purposes. So perhaps Sweden has some way to fall.
Sweden is, at the very least, trying to make life difficult for people, and perhaps incidentally for ‘yet-to-be-documented persons’.
Do they exempt infants from this ‘ID policy’ I wonder? How many fare-paying infants have photo ID?
The best argument against ID cards is that the government hardly ever uses it to implement sensible policies like identify illegal immigrants and promptly shipping them back to where they came from. As bobby b says, the US is an extreme example in this regard. As always, the government instead uses it to make life inconvenient for law abiding citizens.
“How long before our exciting new government finds this a useful way to limit movements”
In Sweden the right to roam within Sweden is embedded in the constitution (this is part of the reason why they didn’t lock down during covid). However, a bit academic as you can’t walk everywhere.
Swedes have a very different attitude towards privacy than do, say, Americans. Everyone has an identifying “personnummer”,
and they’re totally okay giving it to pretty much anyone who asks.
Just as a side note to the expenses of public transport, an automated vehicle fleet, free from the cost of a driver pay and pension expenses, would mean larger numbers of smaller capacity, which is vastly more efficient and would ultimately mean cheaper rides, but the power and political influence of the transport unions means we are stuck with greedy overpaid drivers for the foreseeable future, as their strike agreements almost always include a “no automation” clause.
Remarkably, our esteemed public servants seem intent on tracking our every move in a private vehicle, but don’t seem to realise having an efficient public transport system, affordable and devoid of knife wielding thugs, would be a better option, but I suppose if your paymaster is the transport union and your policy is to import as many knifemen into the city as possible, that isn’t really an option.
I submit that we should ask the Swedes about the motivation for this policy, and consider their answer, before discussing it.
All 10,000,000 or so, or just those who care to answer?
I fail to see why we should limit ourselves by seeking others’ permission to discuss things.
All public transportation should be free at point of use – or available at token charge. So many things solved.
Here in Bandit Country, any bus journey witin the area is now just 2 pounds. The longest possible such journey is about 35 miles. Lots and lots of folk are now using buses much more often. When I was a primary school child 50 years ago Coventry Council did a similar thing. Any journey was 2p. It worked then and it works now.
Stop making rules. Stop charging. Stop making life complicated. Just stop.
The ‘free rider’ problem on London buses has nothing to do with pricing and everything to do with bus drivers’ reluctance to get stabbed over a £1.75 fare.
🙂
I said nothing about permissions, i said that you should give the other side a chance to present their point of view.
The technology now exists to do what totalitarians (such as Henri Saint-Simon in the early 19th century) have wanted to do for centuries – control every aspect of life via financial means.
All buying and selling will be electronic – and thus governments, and partner corporations, will be able to control what people buy (and when they have to buy it). As Dr Schwab (of the World Economic Forum – which has worked with the United Nations and other international bodies, for decades) has said – there will be no more privacy, and that will be presented as a good thing “no more drug trade”, “no more child pornography” and-so-on. People will be told what they can buy and when they must buy it (before their digital “money” expires).
All that is now needed for the totalitarianism to totally control the Western world is for K. Harris to be declared the winner of the November election – it really is as simple as that.
President Trump might (might) oppose Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard and the other financial entities that work as partners with international governance – but a “President Harris” never would.
Although K. Harris (like Barack Obama) comes from a Marxist background – Henri Saint-Simon style socialism (Collectivism brought to the world by the bankers and other FAKE “capitalists” with their endless Credit Money) is clearly acceptable to her.
Nor does Harris have any attachment to the American nation (the Collectivist establishment in America – HATE America, just as the modern leftist establishment here HATE Britain) – international governance (no where to run to), the lady would have no problem at all with international governance.
When one keeps all the above in mind – the behaviour of ABC (owned by the Disney Corporation) and the rest of the media (there wild pro Harris bias and their hatred of President Trump) becomes easy to understand.
The Collectivism of the future will NOT be about the extermination of the Corporations – Marxists putting the Boards of Directors of these Corporations up against the wall and shooting them. On the contrary – the international Collectivism of the future will be international governance working hand in hand with the Corporations, who, due to Credit Money, already have a stranglehold on the economy.
As for those people who support ELECTRONIC VOTING – as in Brazil.
Well they are no better than the people who deny that the tidal wave of fake mail-in-ballots in 2020 had any dishonest effect on the United States Presidential election.
If someone is against voting with paper ballots, cast after showing proper I.D. (proof of citizenship – rather than the endless illegal immigrants the Democrats are now getting to register to vote via driver’s licenses and so on) and counted in public, then what else they say is not important.
There is no point in discussing policy with people who do not care if elections are rigged – indeed just deny that obvious vote rigging has taken place.
People who do not care about the rigging of past elections (in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela….) are very unlikely to care about the rigging of future elections.
Thus making the take over by international governance (with its partner corporations – the financial entities backed up with endless money created from NOTHING) straightforward.
As for those people who say (privately) “it is just to beat Trump – we can rebuild a proper opposition after he is gone”.
Lose this election – and it is over. There will be no more Bill of Rights (First Amendment, Second Amendment and so on) – a couple of appointments to the Supreme Court will kill the Bill of Rights, and the financial and economic system will be entirely under international governance – of government agencies and partner corporations.
The people will be serfs in all but name.
Yes Mr Ed – movement is to be controlled as well. With “the environment” or some other excuse, used as the justification.
The technology, for example to have computer overrides on cars, already exists. How far people can drive and where they can drive to (and where they can not drive to) will be controlled – and most people will not have cars anyway (remember all cars will have to be electric – and there is only a power infrastructure for a certain number of cars).
All that is needed now is the final push – and a “Harris/Waltz” Administration will provide that – not just in the United States, but all over the Western world including in the United Kingdom. For such politicians do not actually invent anything – they are just tools of international forces that have been at their evil work for many decades.
The dream of a boot stamping down on the faces of humanity would become reality.
“For ever?” – I hope not, but it would take a massive civilisational collapse to get rid of such a totalitarian system.
Not a pleasant prospect.
“Hvor är dina papper?” is not Swedish. Try “Var är dina papper?”
Same in Germany, as tickets are issued to the person specified at the time of booking (long distance – local tickets can be bought from machines). ID cards, passports, rail cards etc (all with pictures) are inspected on the train. John K: It’s not the information they are seeking; it is a way of increasing revenue. If I am unable for whatever reason to travel on a time-specific ticket, I can’t give it away; my friend would then have to to buy a new ticket. The rail companies are just piggy backing on the cards already in use. I suspect (although I haven’t checked) that this is common practice in much of Europe.
Mark Helme.
“A man is seldom so innocently engaged as when he is after money” – Dr Samuel Johnson.
If this was just about money I would not care – but it is not.
This is part, a small part, of what is very much an international effort – and the objective is power and control.
Graham,
Noted, thanks and edited. Must have been thinking in Kalmarsk.