How To Hack Subway Fares Using Fare Arbitrage 240
KentuckyFC writes "Arbitrage is a way of making profit by exploiting price differences for the same asset. In capital markets, traders aggressively seek out and exploit these market 'inefficiencies.' Now one data scientist says it's possible to do the same with metro fares and has studied the fare-arbitrage potential of San Francisco's subway system, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). The idea is to swap tickets with another commuter during your journey to reduce the amount you both pay. BART has 44 stations which allows 946 different journeys and 446,985 unique pairs of trips. Of these, over 60,000 have arbitrage potential and commuters can save at least $1 on 4,666 of them. But there are good reasons why cities might want to maintain price differences for certain journeys — to encourage people to live in certain areas, for example. What's more, it's possible to imagine a pair of commuters who each travel from one side of a city to the other at considerable cost. But by swapping tickets in the city center, they could both pay for a short commute in each others' suburbs. But is that fair to other commuters?"
Aren't those things considered nontransferable? (Score:5, Informative)
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everybody knows hacking is illegal.
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But is this more ore less hacking that other arbitrage transactions that are mentioned in the summary? THAt should be considered "hacking", too and subsequently declared illegal, too.
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There's no arbitrage involved at all. Arbitrage involves different prices for the same thing. In the summary's own example, a cross-city trip is the same price whether from east to west or west to east. This story is about cheating the system into thinking you are only travelling a few stops instead how far you really went. That's completely different from arbitrage.
ERROR (Score:3)
"There's no arbitrage involved at all. Arbitrage involves different prices for the same thing. In the summary's own example, a cross-city trip is the same price whether from east to west or west to east. This story is about cheating the system into thinking you are only travelling a few stops instead how far you really went."
It isn't even really that. That is to say, it is, but it depends on how you look at "how far you went". TFA has made an error in summarizing the situation.
TFA implies that a round-trip commute to city center and back costs less than a full trip across town. But then it says that presumably the Metro wants to charge approximately the same per mile. Those are contradictory.
If you take two people who swap tickets at city center, you don't even have to assume equal mileage for each round-trip. But let's d
Re:Aren't those things considered nontransferable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you didn't unless things always exactly lined up you'd end up waiting for the next train. I'm sorry even 5 min of my time is worth more than $1 to me.
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Yeah, but if you set up a shop in the hub station, people could buy or sell from you on their way on or off the train. Of course, even if it's not illegal, the transport authority probably still has the right to kick you off their station, which they probably would do if you tried to buy and sell their tickets.
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Still there would likely be a line. Standing in line to save $1 when it likely will just result in higher property taxes and cause you to pay for it twice doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Generally speaking arbitrage situations exist for a reason: the cost of buying and selling the good + getting it between the markets costs more than it is worth. Hubs are the obvious potential exception but for very low margin items you'd need crazy volume. Particularly good for expensive/highly taxed items (cigarettes,
Go for it (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't really sound worth the effort.
And of course... screw the beta.
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What if there were an app for that, to arrange easy swaps? It sounds like a daily commuter could save hundreds of dollars a year.
And yes, screw the beta.
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I wouldn't really care... and neither should the city or anyone else.
Its marginal.
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I agree. Also, the stupid study assumes that those who are doing the "hacking" are in the same network, would travel around the same time, and play nice to each other all the time as a team. Then the value/profit of the ticket they bought would also need to be shared among all of those arbitrators. A couple dollars here and there for each person is not worth the effort. Also, remember that the more people involved in the same activity, the more disagreements would show up!
The case is valid in the theory, b
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Completely agree.
Maybe if the difference you could save were significantly higher than $1, it may be more interesting. Ex. if you could do this on amtrack going cross country and swap along the way to save $100 on the trip, but it's just $1 on the daily commute. If you are that strapped for cash, you'd get a buck faster by just asking people for a dollar, or save more by just hopping the turnstyle (as phmadore points out below).
If they're going to talk arbitrage of these tickets, they should at least inclu
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Well, a lot of places charge zoned rates - where travel is sort of based on distance.
Let's say you need to go across 3 zones, 1-2-3. If you can team up with someone going the other way, 3-2-1, you can both benefit by swapping - because a 2 zone ticket (1-2 and 2-3) is cheaper than a 3-zone ticket. So you'd buy a 2 zone ticket for 1-2, and they'd buy a 2-zone tic
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I thought you guys were boycotting /. this week?
An inefficient exchange (Score:5, Insightful)
Though these arbitrage opportunities may exist, the act of exchange would render them worthless. Even with a hypothetically perfect market established, the amount of effort required by two parties to submit ticket info, match needs, and go through an exchange outweighs the efficiencies gained by the transaction.
An App for that (Score:2)
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I don't think you've quite understood the idea of a boycott.
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...the amount of effort required ... outweighs the efficiencies gained....
True on a one-shot basis, but if two commuters agree to do this every day five days a week so long as their jobs last, then the setup cost is insignificant. There would be significant long term gains.
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Though these arbitrage opportunities may exist, the act of exchange would render them worthless. Even with a hypothetically perfect market established, the amount of effort required by two parties to submit ticket info, match needs, and go through an exchange outweighs the efficiencies gained by the transaction.
A mobile app and some clever marketing goes a long way. GPS would make this easy.
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Even with an app, would you bother for just a dollar?
It sounds like meeting up with someone on the train every day to swap tickets sounds like one more thing to deal with in a world of too many one more things to deal with.
Ticket use rules (Score:3)
From the Bart website [bart.gov];
When you enter BART, insert your ticket into the fare gate and it will be returned to you. Use the same ticket when you exit
By using one ticket when you enter and another when you exit you are breaking the rules.
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It seems quite obvious from the summary that what they propose is not arbitrage - it is fraud. It's caught by the rule that you state, but more generally they are using a single ticket to make two journeys. In the case of the two hypothetical commuters crossing the city they are both paying for 1/2 journey and then it is being made twice. That is not a price difference between two assets, it is double-spending.
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Right of first sale. I can do whatever the hell I want with my little slip of paper (or do they use cards there now?), and to hell with their "rules".
More to the point, FTS: "But by swapping tickets in the city center, they could both pay for a short commute in each others' suburbs. But is that fair to other commuters?"
Fair? How does it count as in any way unfair? You have stops A, M, and Z, with M at the cit
Re:Ticket use rules (Score:5, Insightful)
Right of first sale. I can do whatever the hell I want with my little slip of paper (or do they use cards there now?), and to hell with their "rules".
You can do with your little slip of paper what you like. But it is used as evidence of how far you travelled, and therefore how much you should pay, and if you pay less because you tamper with that evidence, it is fraud. You pay for the journey travelled, the piece of paper is just a device to measure the distance, and you tampered with that measuring device to pay for less than you should.
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Fair? How does it count as in any way unfair? You have stops A, M, and Z, with M at the city center and A,Z two outlying suburbs. If they consider it just peachy that I can ride A-M-A or Z-M-Z all day every day for $5/trip, it costs the system not a penny more to take A-M-Z and Z-M-A, yet they think they can charge more to do it? The same trains/buses carry the same number of passengers the same distance. Fuck that.
That pig doesn't fly as you stated it. But let's look at the actual situation. Namely, that you don't have 3 stops involved. The number of stops is 5.
A - B - M - C - D
A = Suburb for 1st passenger.
B = Destination for 2nd passenger
M = Metro center/ticket exchange point
C = Destination for 1st passenger.
D = Suburb for 2nd passenger.
Now the first passenger wants to travel from A to C and the second passenger wants to travel from D to B. But by having both passengers meet at M and swap tickets, they actually pay
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No, it applies to just about any physical product, not just copyrighted ones. If you buy a pen, pencil, computer, car, roll of toilet paper, etc., you can do what you want with those, and re-sell them if you want, or give them away or trade them.
Of course, tickets aren't exactly physical products; if we look at airline tickets, for instance, they're tied to your identity and aren't transferable. Yes, they're a piece of paper, but that's just a security item; what you're really buying is passage.
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Can't get any clearer than that. They could use some form of biometrics to enforce this.
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the way hong kong does it is simple.
the card is so useful as general contact free payment card that you load up money on it and aren't going to take chances trading it with some random bozos.
How stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
This is about as juvenile as it gets. All of you know very well that transit systems are a public service that barely can sustain themselves. So, you think then that it's a great idea to work out a way to drain revenue? This is from the thought process of a child, not a mature adult. Adding further to the stupidity of this is that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. It's not like it was some grand secret being hidden by the Gods of Transit, so from an innovative science standpoint, it's a
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Public transit systems are (usually) heavily subsidized. I remember the city of Tallinn (I think) introduced free public transportation, as the city did pay 75% of the real cost of the tickets anyway.
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So I'm thinking that at least in some places public transportation should be free, and there shouldn't be an assumption that users have to be charged for it.
It actually costs a fair bit of money and other resources to charge. Imagine if a subway system didn't need ticket booths, turnstiles, etc and people to check that people pay. So how much more would it cost to run it for "f
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Thinking of the NYC subway system, which people are you talking about? The tickets are sold in automated machines, and they're checked by automated turnstiles. The only humans involved are maybe the subway cops who'll give you a ticket for jumping the turnstile. But they need to be there anyway just to keep order and catch pickpockets and break up fights. In fact, if they weren't wasting their time watching for turnstile-jumpers, they'd be able to devote more attention to more important things, like mak
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I think the transit systems ought to charge a fare that correctly reflects the incremental cost of transporting a passenger down a given transport lane. There should be no arbitrage opportunity.
A fee structure that enables this sort of arbitrage in the first place was the childish thing. Adults don't deny reality, and deal with facts. The fact is humans optimize activities around whatever resource they perceive to be the most scarce in the very short term, for a largish number of public transport riders
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For you, maybe. For some broke-ass person on minimum wage, saving a buck or two a day is substantial. We're talking about public transit here; lots of the people riding it aren't exactly doing well financially.
Fraud (Score:3)
This is, simply, fraud. It's the same as snatching a purse or looting a shop.
Re:Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
This is, simply, fraud. It's the same as snatching a purse or looting a shop.
Except, of course, that neither of those are fraud.
Unless you just meant because they're all illegal, in which case it's also the same as murder.
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Oops, correct, neither of those are fraud. But all are stealing, whether that is illegal or not.
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I think it's an incredibly safe bet that swapping tickets isn't legal, though it's likely a civil offence not a criminal one. Thus if the legality of the action is part of your ethical decision then almost the entirety of the rest of your post is redundant.
There are two ways this kind of abuse can work: 1/ First is buying a ticket from A-B when you want to go A-Z, then swapping it with someone who bought t
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Each passenger must have a valid ticket. [professionalfutzer.com]
The same ticket must be used for Entry and Exit.
The moment you exchange your ticket with someone else you are no longer in possession of a valid ticket and thus broke the law, specifically Section 640 (c) (1) and (2) of the California Penal Code [ca.gov]:
(1) Evasion of the payment of a fare of the system. For purposes of this section, fare evasion includes entering an enclosed area of a public transit facility beyond posted signs prohibiting entrance without obtaining valid fare, in addition to entering a transit vehicle without valid fare.
(2) Misuse of a transfer, pass, ticket, or token with the intent to evade the payment of a fare.
Just curious, have you ever taken public transit? Because every single public transit system that I've used had some variation of "fare is non-transferable" printed on the back of the ticket. Government bureaucrats might not be efficient but they're not stupid, you know.
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"Misuse of a transfer, pass, ticket, or token with the intent to evade the payment of a fare."
and well, it's the law that makes the binding power.
so if you're going to "hack" the system this way, you might just as well jump the turnstiles - doesn't make an ounce of difference. this is just some arbitrage loser trying to score publicity points for selling some "sure thing" arbitrage investment shit in the end.
Major flaw in assumption: This ain't arbitrage! (Score:3)
The major flaw in this assumption is the simple fact that swapping tickets in order to cheat the system and use cheaper tickets is not "arbitrage" nor is it "exploiting price differences for the same asset".
The tickets ("assets") are obviously not the same when you switch them, and get away with using other tickets than you really should have.
- Jesper
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- a "fraction of a ticket" is a valid asset for the purposes of trading
- my ticket from A->B->C contains a "B->C" fraction if I've ridden one stop and am currently at B
Motivation:
- Short subway trips are overpriced due to minimum prices
- Trips of 2 or more stops are fairly priced
- You want to travel 3 stops, A -> B -> C -> D
- I want to travel 1 stop, B -> C
Default procedure:
- You buy a ABCD ticket (standard price per di
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Train companies in the UK do something similar. If you go through London at peak-time (8am - 10am) or (5pm and 7pm), then there is higher ticket price than at other times (x1.5 to x2) . But This applies to any journey starting at these times, not necessarily in London. So you could split your journey into separate ticket segments (8am Liverpool to Oxford) (12pm to 2pm Oxford to London), and avoid this "surcharge".
One difference is that in the UK splitting/combining railway tickets is explicitly allowed by the rules National Conditions of Carriage [nationalrail.co.uk]. Though tickets are non-transferrable.
This is not new / potential scam (Score:4, Interesting)
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Reminds me of the "split tickets" system in the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
Go from Swindon to London at peak hours costs an extortionate £60.50.
Book the ticket from Swindon to Reading and then Reading to London Paddington costs £34 + £22.20 = £56.20, saving you £4.30.
The train from Swindon to London always stops at Reading anyway and you will spend your journey in the exact same train taking the exact same amount of time and you will stand just as uncomfortably for your slightly less extortionate fee. And as opposed to swapping tickets with someone, this is perfectly legit and not against the terms of service.
There may have been some original sensible reason, but it sure feels like a scam to me.
Also, some airliners (KLM, I'm looking at you), charge you MORE for a single flight than they do for a return flight. When I moved country (and consequently only wanted to book a single), I had to book a return ticket which I simply didn't turn up for, otherwise it would have cost me £500 more. There may be some logic in what KLM is doing, but it feels like a big "fuck you" to me.
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Generally because train companies charge prices based on line demand etc but can only charge one rate across the whole journey. In your case the Reading-London section has a higher rate because it's more heavily in demand so if the ticket includes that section then will be charged at that higher rate. As Swindon-Reading is lower rate you can buy a ticket for that section for less as a separate ticket. Bizarrely I'm pretty
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"Bizarrely I'm pretty sure the system came about as a way to 'simplify' ticket costing and avoid companies abusing it :|"
I have no doubt. The result is of course a system which appears blatantly unfair to people in the same way that buying two small packets of biscuits in the super-market may end up cheaper than buying the double size "economy, always better value, package". It is just not right. It should be dead easy to price the journeys to have the same price per "stage" regardless of whether you buy th
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You are almost always better off buying one way at the airport.
IT's usually cheaper, something you can get first class for less then people paid for coach.
The down side is the flight you want may be full so you need to wait for a seat.
I stop doing that becasue the security of having a seat* out weighed the possibility of wait in an airport with kids.
Now that I think about it, I seldom didn't get the flight I wanted. hmmm.
*high level of probability, anyways
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Airlines have a pretty good reason to charge almost the same for singles as they do for returns on international flights - having a return ticket is a big part of determining whether a traveller is not intending to immigrate illegally, so if you travel internationally on a single ticket then that triggers a lot more in the background than it would if you travel on a return.
The airline is responsible (via international treaty) for the cost of removing you from the country if you are found to be in immigratio
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"Airlines have a pretty good reason to charge almost the same for singles as they do for returns on international flights"
This is EU internal, so this is completely irrelevant. Companies such as RyanAir, Easyjet, Norwegian, etc. are more than capable of giving you a decent offer for a one-way ticket for the same routes, the same goes for some of the traditional airliners. I'm afraid this must be KLM internal policy.
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Not really, since not every country in the EU is part of the common Schengen Area, and even then you can still be deported for immigration reasons, so its still a valid point.
Its also not KLM specific at all, its airline industry wide. Just because some low cost carriers choose to eat the costs themselves (they don't actually, the costs are hidden to you) doesn't make it airline specific.
US Airlines (Score:2)
There have been stories about the US airline price structure where people find that a plane trip from A to B costs more than a ticket from A to C with a layover in B, and people have bought the ticket from A to B and just not made the leg from B to C.
The airlines were unhappy and I think were threatening or actually refusing to honor the round trip portion of the ticket, regardless of the fact that the capacity from B to A was spoken for and that they saved fuel costs between B and C on both legs of the fli
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If you get round trip from A to C, then the return must be from C.
airline pricing is screwball.
To begin with it's too dam cheap, and this is killing the airlines, and making t a miserable way to travel.
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not on all airlines.
if you buy finnair to asia and back, one way ticket costs more than going both ways.
but you can buy it so that you for example fly from helsinki to hongkong and then from bangkok back to helsinki.
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Anyway within USA air travel for anything less than 400 miles have become a total waste of time. Given the distance of the air port to your actual destination, and distance between
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Depending on the length of stay, I prefer to drive for longer stays up to about 500 miles. The hassle of the drive is greatly offset by the ability to bring more stuff to make my stay more pleasant and the lack of any air travel headaches.
I had to go to Springfield, IL from Minnesota last March. Flights direct to Springfield weren't viable schedule-wise so I flew to St Louis. After the flight cancellation, re-route via Chicago and drive from St. Louis, it was about 45 minutes LONGER than had I just drive
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Also, some airliners (KLM, I'm looking at you), charge you MORE for a single flight than they do for a return flight. When I moved country (and consequently only wanted to book a single), I had to book a return ticket which I simply didn't turn up for, otherwise it would have cost me £500 more. There may be some logic in what KLM is doing, but it feels like a big "fuck you" to me.
I don't know about airlines, but if you do that on one of the Dover-Calais ferries, they state explicitly that if you don't turn up for the return trip, they will charge you the price of the single fare if it is higher. They also charge you more for a one week return ticket than for a one or two day return ticket. Slashdotters would be up in arms and thinking of clever ways to avoid it, but reality is that there's no legal way and no easy illegal way around this.
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Also, some airliners (KLM, I'm looking at you), charge you MORE for a single flight than they do for a return flight. When I moved country (and consequently only wanted to book a single), I had to book a return ticket which I simply didn't turn up for, otherwise it would have cost me £500 more. There may be some logic in what KLM is doing, but it feels like a big "fuck you" to me.
The "hidden city" fare. As long as you used it on a return or one way with no checked luggage you were OK even ift the airlines didn't like it. Although they could catch it they never seemed to do anything. Back to backs ( booking a trip for two weeks and another round trip back and forth from the origin) to take advantage of Saturday stay fares designed to make business travel expensive and leisure cheap were another story. We used them a lot until our airline of choice caught on and threatened to cancel
It's more than fair. (Score:2)
Public Transportation should be free or heavily subsidized more than it is.
Pay politicians less, cut out zoning pricing crap and don't pay the unions so much or give them so much leeway.
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So your argument is tax people who don't use them and have them operated by slaves?
"...to encourage people to live in certain areas." (Score:2)
"...to encourage people to live in certain areas."
Then make those areas not suck. Don't (effectively) tax me and everyone else because they want to live somewhere that doesn't suck.
How is making people who can't afford to live some place that doesn't suck live in sucky areas going to make them suck less?
Unless what you really what to do is enforce economic stratification by forcing all the poor people to live in the undesirable areas, instead of damaging the delicate sensibilities of the more well off?
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But the entire purpose of mass transit is social engineering. It has nothing to do with getting people from one place to another safely and efficiently. That's just the bait they use to get voters to approve the systems.
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That's a bunch of crap brought up by tin foil hat wearing people who blame 'them'' for all ills.
In the US they where created for 1 reason. So poor people could get around. Everyone else had a car.
That's why they are so screwed up now when other wise car owning people use them. It made sense to have them at a county level then. Today? that make no sense oat all. Mass transit need to be ran, architects, and paid for at the state level. Ending the cross county bullshit, and a lot of problem go away.
What they u
Public transportation should be free. (Score:2, Interesting)
Public transportation should be free.
The utility function of the marginal costs of a (not small) fare + inconvenience + timing + freedom of movement vs. the cost of owning a car is enough that most of us are effectively being paid not to take it in the first place. Being free would up ridership for people on the edge.
The whole idea that it's a profit center is pretty stupid, as all public transportation is subsidized anyway, and exists as nothing but a cost center to generate pension paying positions for g
No, it costs fares because taxes cannot sustain it (Score:2)
Here in NYC the Metropolitan Transit Authority (subway, buses, regional commuter rail, bridges and tunnels - anything you pay a fare or toll for) had a 2013 budget (PDF) [mta.info] of $1,357,806,000. And that's still bleeding damn near another billion a year, with 25% fare increases and 25% service cuts. You could probably slash that overrrun quite a bit more by stopping all current and planned construction/improvements and going to a minimal-maintenance schedule, good luck with that.
Yeah, free transit is a great idea
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So instead of putting on more buses/trains and improving the transport infrastructure, you just keep raising the fair to reduce patronage. Great idea! If they quadruple the fairs tomorrow, they might even be able to get rid of a few entire routes. Less buses, less employees, and therefore lower payroll costs.
I smell profit here!
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All those thing take time, and may not be possible due to other limitation. Like, digging another tunnel is freaking expensive, or there isn't any more space on the rail during rush.
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Alternative explanation: the system is near to capacity, and making it cost money is necessary to curb demand to the point where the system can (just about) cope. Which seems more likely than "Because I want to screw the homeless."
If it's profitable, then the system isn't near capacity until the busses are all separated by one bus length, and the number of passenger cars on BART and CalTrain exceeds the ability of a locomotive to pull them. Until that point, you just add more employees and more equipment and increase your profit, since your fixed administrative costs aren't going to go up linearly with the rest of the direct costs of providing the services (i.e. the ratio of HR people is not 1:1 with the number of station and transp
Not arbitrage (Score:2)
I don't think it is arbitrage in any way. If you read wikipedia beyond first sentence it is
" an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs"
For all real-world use cases of arbitrage, it was about net _profit_ after the arbitrage, not about savings. Example of arbitrage would be buying two tickets which are cheaper that
Tickets (Score:2)
They still use physical tickets in San Francisco? I thought it was supposed to be a high tech centre. All over the world cities are using contactless cards to do this. The Oyster system in London for instance even discourages the use of tickets by making them much more expensive.
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Too bad Melbourne wasn't smart enough to do that.
You have to buy a Myki card to use the PT.
In france there s about the same trick with hiways (Score:2)
This sounds less like arbitrage... (Score:2)
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How is exchanging tickets fraud?
You could save a lot of money doing this in DC (Score:2)
First, dealing with some idiocy:
But there are good reasons why cities might want to maintain price differences for certain journeys — to encourage people to live in certain areas, for example.
I would *imagine* that BART charges more the longer you're on the subway. Just as pretty much every other system does that's not flat-rate. I wonder if the author thinks that AMTRAK charges more for tickets from DC to NYC than from DC to Philly because he thinks they're trying to encourage Pennsylvania tourism.
With that out of the way, yes, you could save a BOATLOAD by doing this in DC, although I'm sure it violates some ToS and would probably end up with you getting banned f
The Math is Solid, (Score:2)
Of course it's not fair (Score:2)
Of course it's not fair.
As constrained as we sometimes feel we are by laws and regulations, the bulk of our society still works on the honor system - people simply doing what they're supposed to, and not doing what they're not supposed to.
Simply because something CAN benefit you, and you CAN accomplish it with little chance of being caught, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.
Disappointed (Score:2)
When I saw "How To Hack Subway" I thought it was going to be about lunch.
Does any one really (Score:2)
take into account the price of Public transportation when deciding where to live? I could save a buck by living in a crappier neighborhood! I'm in.
Interesting idea. I suspect the person the implements an easy way to find and exchange using an app will become a millionaire.
Revenue always finds its level... (Score:2)
If this were to become popular, metro authorities would just raise fares to compensate.
Who wins then?
Stuff like this was done on the ticket toll roads (Score:2)
Stuff like this was done on the ticket toll roads but now days with EZ-pass you can't really do it (well they still have the tickets but the EZ-pass rates are lower) and some ticket toll roads are gone / have there ticket zones cut down with more parts as an barriers system.
OH NO! (Score:2)
Good, this may push more cities to flat rate. (Score:2)
IMO NYC does it right - $2.50 gets you into the subway and you can ride to your heart's content. Yes, it is unfair to both ten-block-hops and massive city-spanning expeditions, but two wrongs make a right - the short Midtown-confined trips that businesspeople and tourists take in droves balance out my cross-metro trips from northern Manhattan out to the Rockaways in the summer (over an hour and close to 30 miles). Also vastly cheaper in terms of implementation and operation - if a card has adequate fare or
Re:SF is easier to hack than that (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're in SF and just trying to go somewhere else in SF, just do what everyone else does and either hop a bus and don't pay the fare or hop the turnstyles and don't pay the fare. If you're trying to go across the bay to Oakland, be more careful, but still, if you don't want to pay, just don't. When I was living there in 2012, this worked 100% of the time that I couldn't afford a trip or didn't feel like paying. The buses are the easiest because you can board on the back. And another thing that's supposed to be happening is a tiered pricing system. But anyway, you don't have to go to much trouble to get around free/cheap in SF, but it seems like it would have been a fun study to conduct.
I bet you like the smell of your own farts too. You do realize how unethical that is right?
Re:SF is easier to hack than that (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course you don't, but we already knew that 'cause you're a self-declared freeloading cunt.
Re:SF is easier to hack than that (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ironic how you blatantly state the above but put the following on your homepage:
(emphasis mine)
"I don’t think I want to be in the western world when it collapses. I think we are such a violent bunch that even I might not survive, and I’ve spent years homeless, did time in Iraq, and so forth. I still don’t have faith I’d be able to guide my family through the chaos of a societal meltdown in a culture which is so coddled and takes so much for granted. I think we need to GTFO here and definitely within the next ten years."
If only 'the other people' were a more ethical bunch eh?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ooh, a thief with a back story. How original.
Re: (Score:3)
For starters : congratulations on your son. I "admit" I never 'gave up everything' for whatever reason but I do know the impact of having children on one's life and point of view. Welcome.
Secondly, I'm not here to judge but merely to point out you were literally suggesting people should not pay for transport in SF if they don't feel like it; all the while complaining on your website that the current generation is one that simply takes things for granted as if they are entitled to whatever they want.
Re: (Score:2)
Otherwise I'd still be out there somewhere, in the woods most likely, waiting for the inevitable collapse-via-inertia of a society which did not adhere to its principles.
This society IS collapsing. The question is how quickly. It's not much different from the Roman Empire and its decline and fall. But if you remember, it took hundreds of years for the Roman Empire to completely collapse (and even that was only in the western half; the eastern half continued for another 1000 years). Other empires colla
Re: (Score:2)
Ah. So, you feel fine with freeloading and forcing everyone else to pay for your transportation and who knows what else, but you want a say in what gets fixed...
Yeah, not terribly sympathetic here. I grew up with very little money, and instead of stealing or cheating my way to getting things that we couldn't afford, we just made do without them. I guess you took the other path: If you can't afford it, steal it or make someone else pay, and then blame the world for not living up to the standards that you ref
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention parking spaces, which usually are at a premium in cities