No longer entitled to your student public transport card? You have to delete the ‘student travel product’ from your chip card yourself, at one of those machines at a station or in a shop. Whoever accidentally continues to travel with it, will get hefty fines.

Last year, students paid over six million euros in public transport fines between them. At one time, this amount was a lot higher, the record being 52 million euros in 2014. After many news reports and a lot of pressure from the House of Representatives, the system has been improved (see box), but is still not ideal.

Pretty much everyone wants the student public transport card to be cancelled automatically once students are no longer entitled to it, for example when they’ve graduated or are taking too long to complete their studies. This is said to only become possible once a new payment system is introduced in public transport.

“My wish as well”

In 2022, then Minister of Education Robbert Dijkgraaf said the following about automatic cancellation: “It’s my wish as well. It’s really clear this is what we have to do. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds in the current public transport payment system.”

Dijkgraaf was happy students were getting fewer fines than before. “We expect we’ll be able to reduce this much further, for one thing because a new public transport payment system will be introduced.”

Critics can’t wait for that new payment system to get here. In 2017, the National Ombudsman stated the following: “

The House of Representatives also continued to find it strange. The Education Executive Agency (DUO) knows for every student when their right to student financing and a student public transport card expires. So why wouldn’t you be able to cancel it automatically? The government had to discuss this with the parties involved, a motion submitted by VVD and CDA at the end of 2016 read. The entire House of Representatives, from left to right, supported this.

No intention

And yet, it won’t happen anytime soon. First and foremost, because there’s a delay: the new payment system for public transport (OVpay) has to start looking for a new bank, now that the collaboration with Bunq has been discontinued. This could take months, says a spokesperson.

What’s more: even in the new system, the travel rights won’t automatically be cancelled once the student is no longer entitled to them.

That’s not OVpay’s fault. “Someone has to tell us that the travel rights need to be taken off the card”, says a spokesperson. “After all, we don’t have that information. It doesn’t matter to us who does it: the students themselves or DUO.”

After 30 days

So the problem is with DUO, or actually with the ministry that thinks up the rules. It will become easier to cancel your travel rights – you’ll simply be able to do it from your computer and you won’t have to go to a machine anymore – but it still won’t be automatic.

Indeed, the student travel product will be “cancelled with a delay” in the future, a DUO spokesperson confirms. “Once the travel rights have expired, DUO will communicate this to the public transport companies after 30 days. This is the case both with the public transport chip card and with OVpay. That’s the current policy, regardless of the system.”

And in those first thirty days, fines are already imposed, if (former) students still use the card. This costs 89.50 euros per half month, or 179 euros for that one month a student mistakenly checks in with the card.

Reason

Why that term won’t be modified anytime soon? In response to parliamentary questions by GroenLinks-PvdA, then Minister Dijkgraaf said last April that this modification would sometimes be to the disadvantage of students.

Sometimes students still have travel rights, but this is not correctly registered in DUO’s administration. This happens, for instance, when they switch degree programmes or when they progress from vocational to higher professional education. This would mean they’d suddenly not be able to check in anymore.

So that’s why DUO doesn’t cancel the travel product right away. As Dijkgraaf explained: “This prevents a student from not being able to use their travel product anymore in a situation where it simply concerns a transition period between two programmes.”

Alternative

But as indicated above, this results in fines for other students. “I want to talk to students about this dilemma”, said Dijkgraaf, “with the feasibility of any modifications being one of the concerns”.

A possible alternative: turn things around. Let DUO cancel the travel rights right away and make it easy for students to reactivate them if they’re still entitled to them. This prevents the situation where someone travels by tram for a few stops and gets a hefty fine.

“Crazy”

The Dutch Student Union has already drawn its conclusion. “It’s crazy that this is causing financial problems for so many students and the minister is sticking to this system nonetheless”, says chair Abdelkader Karbache. “You have a responsibility towards students to prevent them from accruing debt unnecessarily. So make that automatic cancellation happen!”

Member of the House of Representatives Luc Stultiens (GroenLinks-PvdA) thinks feasibility won’t be such a problem. “Of course we have to keep this in mind”, he says, “but I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why the student travel rights can’t be cancelled automatically once students are no longer entitled to them”.

Stultiens suggests there are similarities with the slow-progress penalty of three thousand euros that the current government wants to introduce for students who take longer than one year extra to finish their Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. “Preventing fines for students is apparently not on this government’s list of priorities.”

Box: some improvements to prevent public transport fines

In recent years, the current system has been improved. For instance, you won’t be fined anymore if you haven’t used the card at all. In the past, you would get a fine anyway. This modification drastically reduced the number of fines.

DUO also gives clearer – but not quicker – warnings about these fines than it used to. In the old days, students would receive an email saying a message was waiting for them in ‘Mijn DUO’. As this didn’t sound too urgent, students didn’t always realise they were getting fines.

These days, expired public transport cards also end up on a ‘blacklist’ after a while, so you can’t use them to check in anymore. Before, this only happened after a year. This can’t automatically be done for all cards, because the capacity of the blacklist is limited.

Response by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW)

“OCW strives for optimal service provision to students. It is exactly to prevent unnecessary debts that several measures have been taken in recent years to reduce the number of public transport fines. This has been successful: from more than 50 million in 2014 to 12.2 million in 2019 and 6.2 million in 2023. This is set to decrease further with OVpay, because students will no longer have to go to the payment terminal to cancel the student travel product. They will be able to do so online.

DUO will also have the travel product blocked 30 days after the student travel rights end. Because of this, it will occur less frequently that students continue to travel with the same public transport card.

Thanks to OVpay, it is technically possible to cancel the travel product almost immediately (and automatically) after expiration of the rights. OCW is currently looking into whether it is desirable to keep the ‘delay’ of 30 days, or whether this is to be abolished. In the past, this delay was 60 days.

The dilemma is that shortening the term will reduce the risk of getting a public transport fine for one student, while for another student it may mean they are unintentionally left without a travel product.

The public transport fines will not disappear altogether, as they are intended to combat the unlawful use of the student travel product once the travel rights have expired. The fines also compensate the public transport companies for missed revenues. After all, OCW does not pay for students whose eligibility for the student travel product has expired.”