Tram Cards should be reused!
When I traveled to Istanbul, I arrived at SAW airport and had to travel by metro to Istanbul. At the metro station, one has to buy an Istanbulcard for 70 TL (about 2€) once and can then charge the card using your credit or debit card. Alternatively, one can pay directly by credit/debit card with a small fee (which is not so small, considering you are always paying like 17 TL (0.5€) per trip).
A woman told me to just use the card, which did not work somehow with my card, so she just payed the 17 TL for me - I said “thank you”, she said “that’s fine, all good!”. That was really nice of her as I did not have wifi to inform myself in any way yet.
Help other travelers with the Tram Cards
As the payment is cheaper using the istanbul card and charging it once with a larger amount, I bought a istanbul card, which I can not use anymore when return back to Germany. So it makes full sense to just gift the tram card at the airport back to some traveler which is about to buy a card themselves. This is environmentally the better decision as one card less will be printed and economically, it is also the better choice.
I did exactly that, which created a sceptic reaction of saying “But why are you doing this??”.
Scepticism
It is weird that we humans tend to create a behavior of avoiding any communication with foreigeners in larger countries, as most people randomly giving or telling you something are trying to sell or advertise something. When we are changing this, by providing actual free and helpful advice in some situations, we might decrease this scepticism. This might lead to more people getting scammed though. Actually, there are already people “helping” you to buy a ticket while trying to exchange money at bad rates or receiving some money for letting you use their card, which is a scam.
Though I don’t think that this risk of increasing fraud is a reasonable decision to avoid positive interactions. In the end, communication and interactions make us human.
Generalization
This idea is not only applicable for Istanbul, but also for the 7 day ticket in Wien (if you are staying for less than 7 days), the tram ticket in Sao Paulo or a 4-trip ticket in Germany which you might have only used for 3 trips at the end. And of course also for many more cities which are worth a visit and might handle a little bit of a more positive attitude :)