While the chip technology is interesting, I found the human factors on Montreal's public transit system to be bad. This is based on my experiences in 2023.

The reusable OPUS transit card expires after 4 years unless you have a photo registered. In almost all cities, adult transit cards don't expire and don't require photo/name registration. https://www.stm.info/en/info/fares/opus-cards-and-other-fare...

The system does not have a concept of a monetary balance ($). The system only has tickets (bought in blocks of 1, 2, or 10 with appropriate discounts) and unlimited passes (24 hr, 3 day, week, month). Note that I define a "ticket" as an abstract authorization to ride transit for one trip, not a physical object.

There is no discount for using OPUS. If you buy a block of 10 tickets, it's the same cost whether you load it onto a disposable paper card or on a plastic long-term OPUS card. There is no incentive to reduce waste.

The Greater Montreal Area is divided into fare zones, A/B/C/D. You can use any supported transport agency and vehicle (bus, subway, commuter rail, possibly others) to make your trip. Ticket/pass types have cumulative fare zones, i.e. A or AB or ABC or ABCD. This isn't wrong per se; this is just setting up a definition for what's to come.

An OPUS card is locked to one set of fare zones for the purpose of buying tickets. For example, your card might be set to zone A, or maybe zones ABC. You can only buy and spend tickets of that type. However, you can buy passes for any zones, but they are expensive and intended for long-term commuters.

A new paper card can be bought for any set of zones. e.g. If you want to travel from somewhere in zone A to somewhere in zone C, you buy a zone ABC fare ticket. A paper card cannot be reloaded after the initial purchase.

There is only tap-on, no tap-off. So if you board at zone A, there is no way for the transport system to electronically know if you exited in zone A, B, C, or D. This also means that an open payment supporting credit cards cannot deduct the correct fare amount. There are random fare inspections from human officers to ensure you hold a tapped card with the correct fare type at the location of the inspection.

In light of this entire setup, I can understand why an OPUS card is locked to one set of zones for tickets (which are counted down as you use them). If you tap your OPUS card at a reader in zone A but you own tickets of multiple zone types on the card, how does the reader know which ticket to deduct? Montreal has brought this problem on themselves by not having tap-off and also not using a money-based system.

To make matters worse, the fare vending machines at subway stations are inadequate. There are not enough of them, the menus are slow to navigate through, paying by cash or credit card may have additional frictions (e.g. cash rejected, no change, card payment failure). Thus there is often a queue to buy tickets, making the travel experience that much worse. (Meanwhile, I found Japan's ticket-vending machines to be top-notch - very clear instructions, fast machine response times, and excellent handling of cash.)

By comparison, Toronto has a different strategy and different problems on the PRESTO contactless fare card. The TTC has a flat fare and 2-hour free transfers within the system. GO transit has tap-on and tap-off for buses and trains. For a long time, there was no fare integration between transit agencies, so you had to pay separately on each system; this changed in Feb 2024 so that you pay more or less the maximum of what each agency on your trip charges rather than the sum of the components.

Japan's transit systems mostly use tap-on tap-off, even many buses, and charge by distance. (There are small exceptions like the Kyoto bus being flat fare.) Transit pricing and ticketing is almost an entirely solved problem for decades; the rest of the world can learn from them. (There are still small exceptions, like how travelling between two different IC card regions, like from Numazu to Tokyo, requires a paper ticket.)

As you can see, even if you live permanently in Montreal and own an OPUS card (e.g. zones AB), as soon as you need to make a trip outside (e.g. zones ABCD) your usual area, you need to interact with a ticket-vending machine and buy a paper card. Meanwhile, in Toronto or Japan, you hold one card and the transit systems deduct the correct amount of money based on the trip that you take. Heck, Toronto introduced open payments in 2023, so you don't even need to buy the transit card.