Swedish ticket offices to close

[lmartods]

Being a Brit who emigrated to Sweden, I suppose I have been through the pain barrier on this and adapted.

Sweden is one of the most "digital" countries in the world, in the sense that scores of digital literacy and digital accessibility are very high. Swedish media does occasionally highlight the plight of older people or those with impairments that prevent them from accessing services, but the popular urgency for that seems to be waning.

To give an example of how my life in Sweden differs from my old life in the UK, consider a day I spent last week. I needed a haircut, so I booked a time online at my barbershop. In normal times, I might have taken the county bus, in which I case I would have used my Swedish phone to buy a bus ticket on the county traffic authority's app. It would generate a QR code which I would scan when boarding the bus. You cannot pay a bus fare in cash. Likewise the train. Tickets aren't available at the station. You can use a debit or credit card to buy a ticket from the conductor, but most will use an app and generate a QR code.

Agree with all of this, I am also a Brit who emigrated a few years ago - nearly everything is done via apps and is online. The SJ app is one of the most beautiful and easy to use transport apps. I used to travel Stockholm - Göteborg as well as Stockholm to Uppsala and various regional lines such as Nyköping all via SJ and all tickets bought using SJ's own app. The app is quite simple, it offers trainline levels of ease with none of the extra faff, also integrated with timetables of local public transport so it's very handy especially if you're travelling weekends and nights. It really does put the meagre offerings of many British TOC apps to shame, but as others have mentioned Sweden has a different ticketing tradition, walkups are rare, there are compulsory reservations people usually buy in advance and are already used to using their phone for almost everything be it via Swish for what in other countries would be paid by cash and local public transportation tickets using apps. The last one is a real issue - there are several regional transport systems in the country who don't take cash even in Rural Areas and rely on card, which becomes hilarious when there's an issue with power! as there is on Gotland for example.

BUT the kicker is this only really works well for people living in the country locally, as James mentioned - everything in Sweden runs on having a local personummer - a sort of beefed up NI Number that you need to open a bank account or open anything digitally in Sweden. Those who don't have one are usually stranded out of the system and rely on those who have access. Of course all of this depends on having a phone that is a) smartphone b) charged c) can access the internet at the time you need it. There have been several situations where I have lent my phone to people travelling with me to buy or show tickets, and several situations where the ticket conductor had to wait for me to put my phone on charger or me booting up a laptop to show them a ticket. Quite easy to use untill it's not - I have never had to print a ticket out EVER. Which is a shame as I quite like the convenience of paper tickets being able to be collected anywhere in the UK for example :/

Also although I have never had a problem with using British credit or debit cards in Sweden, there's an ongoing issue with cards from China or Middle East and the US.