Red Tape Hot Box on PKP

Finally the long winter is over and spring has arrived. Moreover, the long weekend ahead should also bring smiles to our faces since many of us will likely escape the big city and go to a mountain or seaside destination.

But young people who must travel by train should make sure that their school ID cards have been properly stamped and contain a signature so they can receive a ticket discount from PKP. Otherwise, an unpleasant encounter with a questioning conductor could ruin their long weekend.

PKP's insistence that student travelers prove their age with their legitymacja (school ID) is rather silly, but I must admit that I took notice only after receiving an e-mail from one of our readers. He has two children who are seven and ten years old, so there's no chance of mistaking them for adults trying to wheedle a 37% discount.

But still conductors must check. After carefully scrutinizing the children's tickets to ensure they are in the correct train and in the right carriage and seats on the specified date, the conductors check their ID cards, comparing the photos to the passengers and looking at the stamp and the signature on the back of the cards. Conductors spend as much time examining the IDs as they do looking at the tickets.

Before his son started going to school, our reader had to carry the child's passport with him to prove that he was not yet of school age. It seems to our reader that the time the conductor spends checking the legitymacje of children, who are obviously of school age, could be more constructively spent clamping down on fare dodgers and collecting money from people boarding the train at stations without ticket offices.

While it makes sense for conductors to check that older teenagers or students provide proof that they are eligible for a ticket discount, this is yet another senseless example of needing a piece of paper to prove the obvious.

Red tape bugging you? Tell Mateusz about it at matdem@poczta.onet.pl.