I didn’t believe it, when a friend of mine told me about it, but today there was an announcement on the subway that corroborates the story: there are people selling faked tickets for public transport in Vienna. All kinds of them, obviously.

Being caught with a faked ticket bought from a peddler in a station somewhere is probably worse than being caught “blackriding” (that’s Germglish for riding without a ticket) because you’d be involved in some fraud scam. Moreover you have to pay for the fake ticket as well.

So if you have to insist on having everybody else pay for the public transport you use, then I’d advise you to not pay at all because the cost/risk-analysis is better.

Follow up from my chat with above friend: No, just because even people who don’t use public transport have to pay for it via taxes, doesn’t mean it is fair for you to use it and not pay for the ticket. That is skewed morals. There are several arguments I heard, but this one is wrong.