Freedom of Northern Ireland tickets are about twice the size of a Citybus Travelcard. The one day ticket has a large green panel on the right hand side with the numbers 1 to 31, months Jan - Dec and years 2001 to 2004 or something like that. The passenger has to scrape off the 3 corresponding panels for the day they want to use it. Seven day Freedom ticket is yellow and has the start and end dates written on it by the ticket clerk.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly enough this morning on the 0745 from Downpatrick to Belfast anyway. The GPS stage changing was working and was very impressive. The bus driver even mentioned that specific feature of the machine to a few passengers, and he isn't a particularly chatty driver so I think he was impressed. But having to print a receipt for every 10-journey ticket holder was really slow and awkward. I think a button on the machine should be programmed to do this with one press, if that's possible. I can't see much point in the receipts as they won't prevent fraud---it is still up to the driver's judgement to see how many holes have already been punched in the ticket.
One person presented a return ticket and they didn't get a receipt for it, just had it punched.
The advertising on the back of the ticket paper was interesting too: on my 10-journey receipt there was: "Spectacular Savings on Ulsterbus 10 Journey, 40 Journey and Monthly Tickets For details contact your local bus station" Does anybody know what this is about or is it just marketing hyperbole? Also "Set your career in motion by driving a bus for Translink, For an application form telephone - 02890 333000"
And the Ulsterbus A Translink service logo was printed in blue and black below each of these ads. The Translink wasn't in quotation marks though---I thought there was some sort of legal requirement that it had to be, something to do with the other company that had used the name Translink---or maybe that's all rubbish.