Originally Posted by
Analise
Also, I meant to mention that when taking the S-Bahn and U-Bahn in both Berlin and Frankfurt, no one came into the cars to verify that the passengers had their tickets and that these tickets were validated.
Also, just curious: In Berlin, I was able to buy train tickets in the future meaning, today, I could buy a ticket for tomorrow. In Frankfurt, the machines only sold tickets for THAT DAY. I went to the customer service office and was told that in Frankfurt, you can't buy tickets for any other day except the current one. Since the DB runs the S-Bahn in both cities, why would Berlin's ticket machines offer more functionality than Frankfurt's?
Got another question: Why does Frankfurt turn off its escalators for early morning travel on the S-Bahn? Berlin kept them on during that same time of day and that was particularly helpful when I had my luggage with me.
On the Berlin S-Bahn and U-Bahn in June and July I saw some people checking tickets were properly validated. Don't see that happen most of the time but such checking -- very limited as it is -- does happen somewhere in the network most days even when we don't see it.
It's very easy to validate tickets with the time stamp, but some people either don't have a clue that it is to be done or don't validate it in order to try to misuse a ticket.
Berlin is a much bigger city than Frankfurt, and I've seen sort of the same thing with the escalators (as you saw in Frankfurt) around Dusseldorf ... which is also much smaller in population than Berlin. It may have something to do with population/use.