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Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards
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."
For that amount, they could have failed at health care for most of the country. How does one city get that far lost?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?
The reason that everybody is trying to move to this type of things is the success of the London oyster card system. Not perfect, but good enough, and is widely adopted.
The key with the London system was the transit fare system was very well integrated to start with. If you bought a zone 1-4 weekly pass, you could take buses tube and trains everywhere within zone 1-4.
The trick to getting adoption was the cash "penalty" fare. For instance a cash bus fare is nearly twice the price of an oyster card fare. And if you buy a season ticket it gets loaded onto an oyster card. So anybody in London needs an oyster card, and so has one.
The other effective thing that was done was to only have oyster top up and ticket sales at stations and offered exclusively to local independent corner stores. The advantage to the store holder is 2 fold, it gave a small financial return to the store owner, but more importantly for the store owner it got people in the store. Topping up oyster cards and at the same time getting a drink or chocolate bar etc. So very quickly every store had one, and in London there are a lot of them so it was widely accessible with very little staffing costs.
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?