PAYG vs. day tickets for European cities' public transit

Post date: 2025-06-28 01:23:31

I have upcoming travel taking me to Münster (DE) and Brussels (BE), and unless I'm very much misunderstanding, day tickets for public transit are a bad idea. I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing crucial context.

So I'm looking at public-transit information for the cities I'm visiting, and in both Münster and Brussels I see a peculiar fee structure which seems to strongly disincentivize buying the actual day passes for transit.

In Münster, both the overall price document and the information on 90-minute tickets indicate the following price structure: €2.30 per ticket, with a daily maximum of €5.20 overall. An actual day ticket costs €5.70.

Brussels is similar. Tap-and-go payment with a credit card is €2.30 with a daily maximum of €8.40, and a day pass is €8.90.

The thing which confuses me here is that it appears cheaper regardless of how much you ride to use single tickets, since the daily cap is below the price of a day pass anyways.

AFAICT, there are two arguments for a day pass:

Less hassle validating and managing on a per-ride basis.

Explicitly on the Münster policies (and not so clear for Brussels), the day-cards are for a 24-hour block while the daily cap is assessed by the calendar day, so that e.g. a single day-card validated at noon on Monday will get Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning rides for a single price, while the daily cap for Monday and Tuesday is independent.

Am I missing something about how this system works? I'm inclined to use single tickets under the circumstances, but I don't want to misunderstand, blithely buy tickets all day, and then discover there wasn't a cap after all.

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