In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design…
You can plan your trip online and it’ll show the amount, but i’d argue that’s a different interface. But all that information is not on the machine where you put your card. It’d be nice if they gave tourists a clearer estimation (e.g. bus/tram across town ~€2, train to the closest city ~€15) somehow. Maybe they put it on flyers or a website for tourists? Who knows. Luckily there are no real surprises, it’s just start-up fee + fee per kilometer.