The Porto Metro, Oporto

At the airport Metro station, there is always a guy who will help you with the ticket ;-) And since recently, you can recharge all the tickets.

The one star is for the tram’s themselves. They work. Actually they work really well and run really regularly. And they are comfortable.
The four stars are lost for what must be the world’s worst ticketing system. A system utterly complex and confused. Imagine John Cleese portraying a lost Hungarian asking directions to his hotel using a Hungarian English translation book written by the same person who designed Porto’s Metro system. However declaring “I will not buy this record it is scratched” to strangers in London is far more likely to result in you finding your destination than trying to purchase one of these tickets.
For a start – it’s all divided into a huge number of zones that have both numbers and letters. You have to know which one you start in, which you go through, and which you will end up in. You can’t just press the stations name and then the destination.
Further, some cards are recharchable – but only if they are going to the same place. Working this out results in you getting a discount.
There is an English menu but the words don’t seem to relate to concepts of transport.
Asking the very helpful Portugese people is no use either, as they seemed just as baffled as the tourists.
Must be an awful lot of very frustrated inadvertent foreign fare evaders.