Today the sales for the "Frischluft-Ticket" of the local public transport (GVB) started. It's a ticket valid for 6 months and it's priced 99,00 €, which is half the price of a regular ticket for this time span. The number of tickets sold is limited to 5000.

The sale was announced to start today at 08:00 am. There should also be an online registration form for those who do not want or cannot go to the ticket sales point at the GVB customer center. At 07:45 am their webserver at http://www.gvb.at/, where the registration form should be available, was already overwhelemd by the sheer number of visitors looking to get their ticket.

As I rely on public transport for my work commute I was eager to get such a ticket, so I decided to go directly to the point of sales at Jakominiplatz. I arrived there by bike and was presented with this sight:

There was this huge waiting queue (I was there at approximately 08:30 am) of people waiting for a ticket.

I think this clearly shows that there is a huge demand for reasonably priced tickets among the people of Graz. The way this sale was planned was in no way sufficient for the demand, neither by preparing and testing their online presence (which is still unresponsive at this time) nor by providing only one point of sales.

The limited amount of tickets does not comply with the intention behind this idea, getting people onto the public transport instead of using their cars to reduce air pollution during the autumn/winter time.

To those who are responsible for planing this whole mess: Next time, don't create such artificial bottlenecks!

Update: The tickets are already sold out. Too bad I didn't get one