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Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards

Posted by Soulskill on from the also-by-yelling-really-loud-at-the-scanner dept.

New submitter johnslater writes "The Chicago Transit Authority's new 'Ventra' stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million."

4 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. What's wrong with Tokens? by ScottCooperDotNet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?

    1. Re:What's wrong with Tokens? by aaronb1138 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Several people are trying to make this completely false point in the bullshitty post Snowden mass media... It requires an incredible amount of ignorance to believe. Facial recognition is plenty fast to track you throughout public transit with trivial difficulty. Cards can be swapped and purchased anonymously. Why would any nefarious government agency wishing to track citizens leave it up to chance like that?

  2. Re:$454 million?? by Spy+Handler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People like to rag on China's rampant corruption and how their high speed rail minister got jailed for skimming $ millions.

    Well, at least they have a functioning high speed rail. USA is just as corrupt, I guess Chicago politics especially, and unlike the Chinese we're left with nothing valuable at the end of the day.

  3. Could this be streamlined? by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just now hopped over to the CTA website and checked out their budget.

    In broad terms, they take in about $650 million from fares, $650 million in public funding (from taxes), and an operating budget of $1.3 billion.

    Hypothetically speaking, what would the budget be if they eliminated fares? The budget doesn't break out the expenses in a way to examine this (at least - I couldn't find it), but it would eliminate a big chunk of the expenses. Not only are there turnstyles and fare sellers, but collection and counting of the money, maintenance on the styles and ticket machines, and so on. Even the financial cost of maintaining a bank account and driving the money to the bank for deposit could be eliminated.

    On the flip side, a person making $15/hr delayed by waiting in line at the turnstyle or purchasing tokens/tickets loses $0.25 worth of time for each minute of delay. A commuter would lose this much twice a day, and the loss would be more valuable if the commuter made more money.

    And this change would benefit poor people the most. It's an efficient way to preferentially give them the benefit of a public service.

    It seems like a more efficient method might be to eliminate the fares and increase public support to cover the difference. The net gain in customer time plus eliminating the fare network might be more than the increase in taxes. Just eliminating the fare mechanisms alone might reduce expenses enough to cover the loss of revenue.

    Has anyone looked into this?