Getting Controlled in Berlin

I got "controlled" for the first time here in Berlin yesterday. "Controlled" is the word they use here for when someone comes around to examine your train ticket and make sure you paid for the train. Their system is not entirely efficient, but I guess it works out in the end. You can get on to any train of tram here in the city (this is similar to much of Europe) and no one will stop you or make you pay or anything like that. You are supposed to know how to buy tickets, and which machine you are to put them in to get stamped. That is all.

Once in a while someone will come around and flash this funny plastic card and, if you are American, you think he is a beggar because everyone then reaches in to their pockets. Then you realize that they are all pulling out their train tickets to show to the guy. If you happen not to have your then he pulls you out of the train and give you a ticket.

(Oddly enough in Israel they have a similar thing on the busses. But there it is rare that you can get on to the bus without paying. You usually have to pass by the drivers from whom you purchase the ticket, so I can't imagine they ever catch someone. The only people they can catch are those who drop their tickets on the floor and those who come on through the back of the bus, and there aren't that many of them. So the odds of getting caught are rare. So why have the people checking tickets at all? The answer is obviously to keep the drivers honest. If no one would check the drivers would just give rides without tickets and pocket the money. This way the drivers can't get away with that.

In New York of course there is no "control" person. You just physically can't get near the train unless you have put in money or swiped your card. There are police who watch the barrier in case you do try to "jump the turnstile".)

Many people here have figured that the they really do not get "controlled" that often, given the amount of times they ride the subway, so it pays to take the occasional fine rather than pay for tickets each time, or pay for monthly passes.

But I bought tickets every time I was able to (total: about 70 percent of the time) ("K" never let us (until she got controlled last week), and "A-" believes that as Jews, Germans are not allowed to ask us for our "papers" on trains because we are historically traumatized about these things, and we should be free to ignore German orders and get off whenever we feel like it). The machines do not always accept bills, or the train sometimes comes before you have a chance to buy the ticket, so you just hop on. This time I was lucky. I had managed to get one. I had about five minutes to wait for my train and the machine accepted my EU 5 bill.

I remember getting controlled in other cities last year. Once in Budapest I think someone asked for my ticket. I passed that one too (that was the only time we figured out how to get tickets there). In some cities you really have to know the secret of where to get the tickets. I remember once in Munich having no idea what to do, so I avoided the guards (who wear uniforms there). In Romania, I am pretty sure that no one even made any pretext about getting tickets. No one bothered. There was no real system for getting them, and you just had to know what to do. But most of the locals did not really bother, and we never had any problems.

Like John Travolta said in Pulp Fiction about Europe "It's the little things that are really different." and they really do not know what a quarter pounder is.