Not for transit please.

This kind of thing is illegible (not to mention inaccessible) for visitors. Someone comes to your city and they want to ride a train instead of driving their rental car into your downtown. Your transit requires a card. They're not comfortable with your language, they have to find a machine, and the first one doesn't work right.

They finally get a machine that works, after standing in line behind several other people. It turns out they need to buy a new special card and then load it with one of a number of confusing products.

They get your pretty card. Then they have to pay attention to where that card is at all times, and buy exactly the right number of tokens. They can only buy tokens in a few select locations in your city, realize they have run out, and end up Ubering for the rest of their trip.

We have wallets built into our phones now. Transit is a utility - it should universally take tap to pay, and more major cities are now rolling that out. Zero planning, zero extra "new and unique" objects to keep track of.

If you want a date based pass for a long visit instead of paying per trip, both Apple and Google have a way for you to buy transit passes directly from their wallet. You can always make that virtual card pretty.

Some places it remains - and I do find something cute about the physical train ticket that says NYP NYP that I used just today.

When my stepmother died we went through her things and found all sorts of ticket and metro stubs from the year she lived in Paris. I’m saddened by the loss of these ephemera that carry a little story. I went to Radiohead last December and the supposed “memory ticket” was just a flyer basically, with nothing personal about it.

On the other hand, a few years ago I was in Paris and when the metro spit my ticket back at me it blew away in the wind. I suppose there were some downsides…