I always think it is a good sign of the overall health of their societies that cities like Munich and Vienna, despite their size, still can implement an 'honesty' ticket system on the public transport. While of course there are regular checks, my own personal experience is to have traveled many times and only had my ticket checked once or twice, and having only once seen someone else in the carriage being forced to pay during such a check, it was obvious the level of conformity was quite high. But it is interesting to get some hard numbers on just how many 'cheats' these checks turn up. The following story from the Austrian News reports 60,000 violators, out of approximately 2 million people checked. While 60,000 sounds a lot, it works out as just 3%, which is remarkably low. One could also expect that the checks are presumably carried out at the most likely times for people to cheat (I would guess there's more temptation at night than on a regular morning commute) so overall the percentage is probably even slightly lower. So good to hear, and a good example of how people can be trusted to do the right thing...at least in Vienna!
http://wien.orf.at/news/stories/2529980/
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