New gates at Budapest's Keleti station stop regular people, not fare-dodgers

At the most heavily trafficked train station in Hungary, misleading boards, wrong information and misplaced platform gates work together to make sure passengers are anything but bored. These annoying mistakes are not due to the age of the more than 120 year old building of Budapest's Keleti, but to the latest improvements and additions, writes index.hu.

Roughly 100,000 passengers use the station every day, as all the international trains crossing Hungary enter the Keleti, as well as lots of express and intercity trains and several suburban lines. The newest "upgrade headache" is the introduction of platform gates in order to prevent fare dodging. The main point in placing the gates was that they reach from wall to wall, which made several locations, such as some shops, the police office and the duty officer accessible only with a valid ticket.

But according to the portal, the coup de grâce is that the international ticket office can only be accessed by going around half the building or first buying a domestic ticket to gain access. To make their way from one side of the building to the other one, passengers must pass through three platform gates. While it is unclear how many gates can be passed with one ticket, the guards usually prefer if a person only tries to get through one gate per ticket.

As the portal pointed out, it would have been a much better solution to place the gates at the side entrances which would leave the stores and offices accessible and also require fewer controllers as there would be fewer gates. The state railway probably chose the more complicated and more expensive solution to make sure that the whole length of the two side platforms falls within the gates, which is unnecessary.

The system, while really complicated, is not in the least effective because if one claims to be heading to the international ticket office, the police office, or to the other side of the building, it is possible to pass the gates without a ticket, and fare dodgers, being everyday passengers, know this.

The public address system can also be a nuisance when the person whose only job requirement is to inform the passengers about the trains, provides false information for some reason. The recently implemented information boards are much smaller than the old ones used to be, and they are full of abbreviations which not only confuse foreigners but can cause problems for Hungarian passengers as well.

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