Other people’s public transport is usually fun to unravel. So far this month I have variously been assured on some buses in Lithuania and Poland that I must get a ticket in advance; on others, I had to pay the driver. Some buses were cash only, others insisted on payment by card (or phone).
Flying on from Warsaw to Palma, the driver of the airport bus into town needed €5 in cash – but at least she could sell tickets, unlike increasingly many airport bus services (Lodz in Poland, for example). But last Wednesday evening, I fell foul of the Kafkaesque ticketing trap devised by Mallorca’s otherwise excellent public transport network.
The island’s railway – a train line running northeast from Palma – has improved by leaps and bounds over the years. The metre-gauge service is now a metro, with smart air-conditioned trains as frequently as every 10 minutes. But unlike any other such system I have seen, each platform is a stand-alone entity.
You can access the platform only by an automatic gate, and – as I discovered to my discomfort – you cannot cross from one platform to the other without exiting the automatic gate.
So what’s wrong with that? Well, at a small station seven stops from central Palma, Pont d’Inca Nou, I bought a ticket at the entrance to platform 1 for a train that was departing from platform 2.
When I say “ticket”, it was just a paper receipt with a QR code, which I duly scanned. The gates allowed me onto platform 1. Where, I wondered, was the bridge, subway or street-level walkway that would allow me to cross to platform 2 to catch the Palma train that was due to arrive in two minutes?
Every railway I have ever used allows you to do that… except in Mallorca. But there is nothing to indicate the unusual arrangement. Indeed, I was able to buy a ticket to the island’s capital from the wrong side of the station and go through the gates to a platform from which trains are travelling away from Palma.
Whoever programmed the whole thing presumably knew they were dispatching unknowing passengers into a transportational black hole where the normal laws of travel physics cease to exist.
No, you cannot retrace your steps because the machine has already checked you out of Pont d’Inca Nou. The only permitted journey is down to Palma, but you are trapped on a platform from which the only way is up. And yes, I did check out the fences: they are Iron Curtain grade.
All I could do was catch the next northbound train – immediately placing me at risk of a penalty, because I was going in the opposite direction – and hope a more normal arrangement prevailed at the next stop. It did not. I was unable to cross to the southbound track without exiting through the gate, which was never going to let me through because my ticket was not valid.
So I tailgated another passenger, and followed her over the pedestrian crossing that is unhelpfully located outside Stalag Platform 1, as I now knew it. As luck would have it, she had evidently overshot her station, and was heading for Platform 2. So I was able to tailgate her again (of which she was probably getting fed up). No ticket examiner appeared in the two minutes the train took to trundle to my original station, from where I was finally travelling legally.
Should you have the good fortune to find yourself in Mallorca, please do not follow in my tailgating, ticket-bending footsteps. And to Serveis Ferroviaris de Mallorca, the island’s rail operator, I say: put up signs saying “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”.
There is a serious point: an excellent way to cut traffic congestion in Mallorca is to encourage more rail use. But that will only happen if holidaymakers feel confident about using the trains.
