Price of disposable Stib ticket hiked up by 50 cents

In a bid to get everyone to access Brussels public transport system with a Mobib card or contactless payment, Stib is making single paper tickets 50 cents more expensive. So while using your bank card or smartphone to pay for a single trip costs €2.10, a paper ticket bought from a machine at a station will cost €2.60. The higher cost starts on 11 October.

Stib introduced contactless pay terminals in all metro stations, as well as trams and buses, this past summer. A quick swipe of a debit or credit card sporting the contactless payment symbol will get you a single journey. Using the same card, you will never be charged more than €7.50 a day, regardless of how many trips you take.

A Mobib card, meanwhile, can be loaded with tickets, which are cheaper the more you buy. Load 10 tickets in the machine, for instance, and you pay just €1.40 per ticket. Mobib cards can also be personalised and loaded with specific subscriptions.

Phase-out

Stib wants to eventually phase out single disposable tickets and so is making them more expensive to encourage commuters to use one of the other options.

Contactless payment was immediately popular when it was introduced on 1 July, with 54,500 trips paid with a swipe of the card that month alone. In total, more than 265,000 tickets have been bought using the contactless payment method.

Disposable paper tickets only make up 4% of total tickets sold, said Stib in a statement. “While that’s relatively little, we’d still like to encourage travellers to use one of the more sustainable payment methods. The disposable tickets contain metal that is unfortunately not recyclable, they cannot be reloaded, and they are more subject to being damaged than a Mobib card or bank card.”

Photo courtesy Stib