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How To Hack Subway Fares Using Fare Arbitrage
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?"
Where I live, if you get caught selling or giving away a bus ticket to somebody else after using it, you can get dinged with a rather heavy fine.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Doesn't really sound worth the effort.
And of course... screw the beta.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
I feel like there could be designed an app for a lot of that that would automate it easily, maybe even integrate with something like hopstop
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
From the Bart website;
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.
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 big fat fail.
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?
This is, simply, fraud. It's the same as snatching a purse or looting a shop.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Tickets are a dumb idea for mass transit. Most of Europe sells (bi)weekly or monthly passes at a fixed price. For example, here in Budapest, Hungary, Central Europe I can buy a monthly pass for ~ 46 usd / 34 euros, which allows unlimited use day and night in an area of about 525 sq. km / 203 sq mileson buses, ETBs, trams, trains and subway. Of course passes come with photo ID, so arbitrage is not possible if there is enforcement at the ingress / egress. (Which is strictly true for the underground railway, but less so for the surface transit.)
The idea behind this is? No-brainer mass transit use probably makes people use cars less often (if they have any, which is not a given in Europe) or think less about getting a car if they do not own one. One part is the green benefit or cutting pollution and the other part is the saving in oil imports, almost all coming from the russkies, so the various small european countries do not have to get on all-four to please Tovaris Putin of the ex-KGB fame.
Ticket sharing was the subject of an episode of the Big Bang Theory less than two weeks ago. The guys decided not to be badasses.
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
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Decades ago, the employees of our national highways that collect tools used this very same scheme of swapping tickets to defraud their own employer in millions. The scheme went that if you were paying not by credit card, but in cash, and coming say, from a city 300km away, they would swap your ticket with a city 10km away, and would pocket the diference. Colleagues on another posts in nearby cities would swap tickets already pre-validated for that effect. From the little we could heard about it at the time, this scheme went on for almost a year, until they got more greedy and careless and got caught.
Why not share links to online screeners of new movies, slashdot? Might be the only way to resist the slascot, your'e beta fiasco.
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.
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.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Of course you don't, but we already knew that 'cause you're a self-declared freeloading cunt.
"...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?
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?
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
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 government employees anyway.
The whole point of making it cost something - anything - is the same reason that health insurance plans require copays: to discourage use. For public transportation, the use they are attempting to discourage is that the homeless will ride around all night in order to avoid freezing to death, or because they have nowhere else to go.
Clue bat: the homeless use busses as public housing anyway, they just get their day out of the way first (I had a nice long conversation with a homeless person who does just that, getting on one of the bus routes that runs all night, and getting off near where he gets on the next morning). Just address your damn homelessness problem, instead of trying to pretend it doesn't exist, or making life (more) miserable for the homeless.
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 sure the system came about as a way to 'simplify' ticket costing and avoid companies abusing it :|
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.
lol.
Beta doesn't bother me, though. I'm more interested than the stories than I am the format. As long as they let us comment, I wouldn't even care if they installed that Disqus bullshit.
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 single ticket and then selling it to gullible customer for price higher than what you have paid (possibly lower than price of total ticket). If you could do that while keeping your costs (buying and transporting tickets, 'advertisement', factoring in unsold tickets etc etc) low enough and turn profit, then it is an arbitrage. But even then, given inherent risks of not selling all tickets, it would not be a proper arbitrage. To make it proper, you should sell tickets first and deliver them later - only this way you are sure that profit can be realised.
Ooh, a thief with a back story. How original.
I remember one time I jumped the Fruitvale BART turnstyle right in front of a cop, made eye contact, and kept walking. He didn't feel I was unethical enough to write a ticket.
It may not have been his job. Not all police do the same job, anymore than people in any other profession.
As for airlines, sometimes it cuts both ways. United's one-way price is sometimes less and sometimes more than round trip. Actually, often the same. Once, to use some flight credit for a pair of cancelled seats booked separately for the same flight, I had to book two one-way, multiple hop flights (at the advice of a CS agent) to use the credit, because it couldn't be combined in any way. The whole thing ended up being absurd. There was no price difference.
Ah, but in that case you're still buying tickets for the actual journey you make. This is different: two people buy tickets for short local journeys, take a "detour" (with respect to the tickets they have, not where they actually want to go) into the city centre, swap tickets, and travel back out to their destinations. They're not making the journeys printed on the tickets at all - they're making different, and much longer ones, that happen to have the same endpoints.
So, to address various other comments, yes, it's probably fraud.
Wrong. The BART has its own police force, unless I'm wrong. But I'm not.
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.
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 immigration violation at your destination, so they have to have that covered or they are out of pocket.
The cost of the single doesn't quite cover both trips, but it is more expensive than what the single would actually cost if the above didn't have to be taken into consideration, but that also means that the return ticket cost is often subsidised by the higher single prices.
When a "data scientist" discovers a small-time fraud opportunity and calculates all the different ways it could be perpetrated, they are "hacking" and the con is "arbitrage."
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.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
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 flight.
I'm sure they had some complex rationale, like maybe competition made the A to C route by itself break even and without making a profit on A to B the entire route lost money, something like that.
But airline fare pricing has always seemed screwball to me.
There may have been some original sensible reason, but it sure feels like a scam to me.
It's a consequence of the fact the railways were created by and are still run by multiple rail companies and each sets their own prices. When you cross the boundary from one to another you see this happen, or when multiple companies run on the same route.
In france, on some highway, if you exit then re-enter the highway in the middle you may pay less. That's because private highway compagnies must, by contract, have some average price. So to make more money, the most used fares are more expensive and the less used ones are less exepensive, and in average, that match the contract they signed with the governement. Threre's a site dedicated to calculate how much you may gain by doing this : http://www.autoroute-eco.fr/
"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.
Kinda the opposite. The entire point of modern transit-less suburbia is social engineering. The entire idea was to force automotive usage, largely because a particular breed of crackpot libertarian (and unfortunately not even out-of-the-mainstream type - even Margaret Thatcher spoke in support at times) believes cars are "pro-freedom" and obsessed about that in the first half of the last century.
Transit developed pretty naturally in the last half of the nineteenth century and when implemented in an organic way is usually profitable and popular. Of course, today, it's rarely profitable, especially in the US, but that's in part due to two major reasons.
The first is that the suburban movement has made it pretty damn near impossible to implement in most parts of the US, and so what's there is expensive and difficult to use.
The other is that in places like, for example, New York City, the high demand for in-city living (in a country starved of urban development, what urban space survives is in extremely short supply) means living costs are already through the roof, and the city itself needs to ensure basic services are kept affordable or else lose people able to fill essential but underpaid jobs. In some cases, like transit, this is just good policy anyway, the cost of expanding the road system far outweighs any subsidy you give transit to ensure its ongoing popularity.
Transit came first. Social engineering was used to get people off transit by the far right. Politicians have refused, over and over again, to do more than dip their toe in transit despite the massive popularity of such a position until relatively recently. And now you're claiming that it's transit that's social engineering? Bollocks.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"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 the full journey or buy each stage individually.
The ridiculous thing is that it IS easy. This is proven by all the third party websites that offer you this service (SplitYourTicket, SplitMyFare, RailEasy, etc.). It really should be easy to sort this out through the official channels.
The section you quoted does not define what a valid fare actually is, nor does it grant the fine print on the ticket any sort of binding legal power.
... and more like fraud. TZ
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 from the system. The minimum rush hour fare on DC Metro is $2.10, the maximum is $5.75. So if I'm travelling from Huntington to Greenbelt (for example), and I found someone who was doing the reverse trip, we'd just have to swap cards at Mt. Vernon Square, and we'd each save $7.30 a day, or about $150 a month.
Note that DC Metro is the one where the General Manager, during a period of service cutbacks (due to long overdue track maintenance) and unprecedented rate hikes, bragged about having a record surplus. So yeah. If I could get away with it, I'd totally do this just to "stick it to the man."
And generally, people who can do math this well aren't using it to save a buck on bus fares.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
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.
-Styopa
Haque says that not only are opportunities for fare arbitrage possible on BART, they occur on more than 13 per cent of all pair-wise combinations of journeys offering considerable potential for savings.
When I saw "How To Hack Subway" I thought it was going to be about lunch.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Yep. Some woman squirts out a baby and says it's yours, and all your ideals and ethical standards change. Cuz now yer a breeder. Welcome to the breeding compound. Nothing is more important than that one particular kid.
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 collapse quite suddenly. It's hard to say how long this one will last.
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.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If this were to become popular, metro authorities would just raise fares to compensate.
Who wins then?
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
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 use now to get approval is the idea that they are some how environmentally friendly. They aren't, especially buses. IT's FAR more environmentally friendly of everyone on the bus drove a car instead.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nice narrative there. Do you have a leaflet I can take, or maybe your organization's newspaper?
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.
Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean you should. If everyone else is killing babies and chewing on their bones, well hell it's immoral but everyone else is doing it so why shouldn't I?
Following the heard is in and of itself immoral. Morality starts and ends with the self: what you chose to do defines you as a person of good or bad character regardless of what everyone else does.
Listen, go down to ... I think it's Montgomery, near the 7-11 that's near the Ritz, and watch that bus stop. Watch just how many people actually pay the fare. Then fuck yourself.
That in no way addresses the issue that you are an immoral dick.
The ticket is for 1 person - the same person - to go from point A to point B.
You have a legitimate argument that if you buy a ticket from Point A to Point B that you have a legal right to sell it before you use any of the value of the ticket and that any law or condition of contract that says otherwise is illegal. You may not win this argument without a good lawyer and you may not win it even with a good lawyer, but you have a legitimate argument.
Once you embark, it's your "license to travel" to use or not use.
Now, you DO have the right to sell the piece of paper as a not-valid-for-travel piece of paper. Perhaps 100 years from now it will be a collectable.
Probably bitches about how much taxes he has to pay to keep the buses and trains running too, without ever making the connection is his mind.
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 future trips using them. Technically it violated their tariffs, but we simply booked the mid week on another airline in a big FU to them. After they saw our revenue dropped by 50% which cost them a lot of money when you have 200 trips a week they called us and said "belay my last" and we went back to using them for all my trips. Competition is a good thing.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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 refuse to adhere to.
Not sure why you got modded troll, you speaketh the truth, and from a place of honesty at least. I had a buddy that came into town and crashed with me that rode to work every day. He legitimately thought you didn't pay going downtown, only back when had to go through a turnstile. That's how lax the enforcement is/was.
Of course, in the past two years (more?) they now have the "enforcement mob" of twenty or so dudes in orange vests waiting with a cop to hand out tickets. They go to different stops every day so a 100% evade rate is probably more unlikely now.
s/swaps/stings/
s/save/be fined/
Dumb petty thief tries to justify himself.
I don't need justification. If you have something I want and I can take it from you...I will. If you resist, I will fuck you up.
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) 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 in theory, but if you've figured out how to squeeze three billion dollars a year in sustainable tax revenue out of a single city, even a large one, you're a better economist than I.
Clue this: the homeless have pretty much free access to the subways - most stations no longer have attendants on duty so hopping a turnstile and riding for days on end is feasible. Hell, I've done it myself (I have a monthly pass so not swiping isn't taking a fare). Foul smelling, insane homeless emptying entire train cars is a bigger problem than them freezing to death, at least in this town.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
About 20 years ago I had a co-worker that would often fly from the west coast to Washington DC. The best flights were direct non-stops, but they were very expensive (about $2K at the time). He found that since Dulles was a hub, if he booked a flight to a smaller airport on the east coast, he could get a ticket for about $500 where he was supposed to "connect" at Dulles, but instead would just leave the airport and not show for the second leg. Only downside is he could only take carry-on luggage since he couldn't check anything, but they were all shorter trips booked last minute so that worked fine for him. Saved a ton of money. He would do the same for the return with the hub being San Francisco of Los Angeles. Airlines never said anything. He even once found out the second leg was oversold (it was the next gate when he deplaned), volunteered his seat, and got a travel and meal voucher, all for not using the ticket he wasn't going to use anyway.
A few dozen people are saving a few dollars! Better spend 10 million to stop it!
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 time remaining, the turnstile opens and that's the end of the transaction. I really don't get why a proper metro-area mass transit system would ever be metered (commuter rail is a different beast, but that's regional).
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
When I was young, I went to visit NYC. I parked in the farthest location one could get on a Subway car to get there. The ticket machines were broken, but someone was there selling the day passes for basically the same price. Except they weren't selling the passes either, they were swiping you in. Of course, even though I was young and stupid, I realized after the hustle what had happened, and how it basically only works well because in NYC they didn't require a pass to get out of they system [ just to get into it]. -- they bought a whole bunch of passes that work multiple times (with some sort of lock-out period), and then broke the machines so anyone trying to get on at that entrance had to go through them.
Don't they, like, execute people for free-riding? :P
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.
That's nothing new. Pretty much all the major carriers do it in my experience, at least here in Europe.
Which is, funny to say, probably the only shenanigan low cost carriers like ryan air and easy jet DON'T do!
Haque gives the example of a commuter travelling from Millbrae Station to the south of San Francisco to the downtown station, Embarcadero, a journey that costs $4.50. Another commuter travelling from Glen Park in San Francisco to Berkeley on the other side of the Bay pays $4.20. So together they have to fork out $8.70.
But if these commuters meet and swap tickets, it’s possible for them to pay $5.10 (Millbrae to Berkeley) and $1.85 (Glen Park to Embarcadero) or a total of $6.95. That’s a saving of $1.70 or 20 per cent.
An interesting point is that there is no transfer station between Glen Park and Embarcadero. The person going from Glenn Park to Berkeley would have to go in the other direction to Balboa park or the person going to Embarcadero would have to go to 19th St/Oakland. This would require one of them to reverse direction and I am wondering if it one even has access to trains traveling in both directions at the transfer stations.
In the end, is traveling out of your way, searching for the person to transfer the ticket to and making an extra transfer really worth saving $1.70 a day?
Right of first sale applies to sold objects ("goods"). If you buy a hammer or buy a copy of a movie, you own that thing. There may be some some laws saying what you're allowed to do with your thing (the state government says you're not allowed to use the hammer to hit people in the head, the fed government says all kinds of complicated things you're not allowed to do with the movie) but the seller has absolutely no say at all.
If they really need to have a say, then they can try to use purchasing contracts, but purchasing contracts tend to result in most customers saying "fuck that" and walking away. Generally, the desire to do business outweighs the desire to have a say in what becomes of the item, so these things tend to be rare and only used for infrequently-acquired or expensive goods. And then even then these contracts of adhesion tend to have limits.
(There's a lot of possible digression here, various schemes have been tried where sellers have their cake and eat it too. Some have been successful, though they all smack of illegitimacy. e.g. shrinkwrap EULAs, Human Centipad, etc.)
When you get to services, people are able to make a stronger case that there isn't a "good" for first sale doctrine to apply to. BART will say they didn't sell you a ticket; they sold you a ride. The ticket is just an authorization token. That's different from a hammer or movie disc, where the item itself is what you wanted. Nobody wants a ticket nor does the piece of paper have much value in itself; people want rides, not tickets.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
In the US they where created for 1 reason. So poor people could get around. Everyone else had a car.
Public transit pre-dates the invention of the personal automobile. It was not invented as an alternative for poor people. Try to pin down whoever told you otherwise and carefully forget anything else you "learned" from them.
The act of identifying and exchanging the tickets alone would prevent this from being exploited for the most part as it represents a sufficient transaction cost. And I'm not really sure this is technically arbitrage per se.
Back when I was poor and could barely afford public transportation when I had to use it, I thought about keeping multiple BART tickets I would use to make it look like all my longer-distance trips were actually short-distance ones that just took a long time, but I never implemented my plan. There are plenty of moral issues with stealing from a public service, but truth is those seem less important when you're a teenager with no money, but I think practicality is what ultimately prevented me from doing it.
Even if the system didn't care that a ticket was used to exit on a different day than it was used to enter (this is a big if, since BART is not a 24-hour service, making it easy to prevent such fraud), I would have to label and keep track of so many tickets and carry them with me whenever I wanted to use the train that it was really never worth it. No way was I going to get someone else involved, and the trouble of having to intentionally get off at the wrong stop sometimes was just too much trouble.
A friend of mine would just buy red children's tickets and use an x-acto knife to cut the magnetic stripe off and glue them onto standard adult blue tickets. Still stealing, still wrong, but much easier than anything suggested here.
Then fuck yourself.
If he could do that, I doubt he would go through with the whole bus stop watching thing.
"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 do so anyway for the sake of simplicity.
If a round trip half the width of town costs less than a one-way trip all the way across town, then the Metro is NOT charging the same for every mile. And since the Metro itself is charging different rates for the same number of miles in one situation versus the other, how are you "cheating" by taking advantage of this? The only difference is that YOU are deciding, rather than the Metro, who gets the discount. I see no moral or ethical problem with that.
And then they have a second kid and they have to decide which one they like more.
And that statement pretty much sums at least half the problems of society today. "Some woman"... Maybe if men and women were a bit more discriminating (old-fashioned) about their partners and waited until they had settled into committed relationships they plan to stay in before copulating, then it wouldn't be just "some woman." If you think you are in that type of relationship and still refer to her as "some woman", then you are not, in reality, in that type of relationship.
And, yes, parents should be doing everything they can to help their children while stopping at harming anyone else's.
Here is my vote for what needs fixing...
Freeloading thieves get to spend some time isolated from the rest of society.
More so than the efficiencies, unless you went through the trouble of getting an exactly priced BART ticket for that single trip, you will be swapping tickets that potentially still have more cash value on them. Most commuters have switched to using Clipper card (rfid based pre-payment system) which works well for BART but is a craptastic company to deal with and is setup horridly on the other transit lines (Caltrain specifically). Simply the time I save not having to stand in line to buy a paper ticket at a machine, reduced to the exact ride price (look it up on the fare chart, hit buttons many times to reduce the default $20 ticket to the exact price if its credit, or spend time counting out change to feed the thing) each trip and instead just swipe my wallet over the turnstile and walk through is worth more than any potential saving, if I even happen to ride a route that has this arbitrage opportunity (doubtful).
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Life is not fair, my dears. Do the best you can under the circumstances.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm busy exhaling deadly carbon dioxide into the air you breath.
-kgj
BART trips are mostly priced by distance (which automatically enables this so called "arbitrage"), but there are a couple of details that increase the potential reward of this scheme: Trips that both begin and end in SF cost only $1.75, which I think is the cheapest any ride on the system ever will be. Trips that go under the bay (between SF and Oakland) get an extra charge.
So if Alice is going under the bay one direction, and Bob is going under the bay the other direction they can exchange tickets for a discount.
There's a couple details that complicates this exchange: 1) A ticket is charged the maximum ride fare if it has an identical entrance and exit station. 2) Alice and Bob must trust each other not only because they need to communicate entrance stations, and coordinate the fare on each card (I buy my tickets at a discounted rate for $45 per ticket, and use it until it's used up), but also because BART ticket fakes are incredibly common and you can't tell a fake until you run it through a machine.
Also, regular BART riders just use a (usually high value) Clipper Card for speed, and it's only occasional riders who buy exact value tickets, and they're confused enough as it is.
TL;DR at least one of the participants needs to change trains for this to work, and a lot of info has to be exchanged. Most riders optimize for speed instead.
I remember one time I jumped the Fruitvale BART turnstyle right in front of a cop, made eye contact, and kept walking. He didn't feel I was unethical enough to write a ticket.
You got damned lucky, BART police, especially in Oakland, love to jump on people. Gate-jumping is not something I recommend most people do.
You must not be a black man, I guess.
Since they're obviously mostly relying on the honor system for you to buy tickets for your entire journey, of course this is stealing. I hope they get busted.
You must be a cop. :P
I fought for a say in what gets fixed, working-class hero.
For God's sake post your address and I'll send you $1 to pay the damned fare so that I won't have to read your whiny, bullshit justification for your dipshittery again.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Here is my vote for what needs fixing...
Freeloading thieves get to spend some time isolated from the rest of society.
Except for his overly friendly cellmate...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You are right, of course.
I am aware of the difference between CO2 and CO, and considered toning down my inflammatory (asphyxiatory?) rhetoric.
But in the end (motived by +funny karma whoring) I chose polemic black humor over rational scientific discourse, hoping that no one would call me out for bad science.
-kgj
I often left a ticket that was still valid, but that I had no use for anymore, in a very visible place, a bit high up. Would be nice if that would be better organised.
But now tickets are becoming digital everywhere, I hardly use the public transport system anymore. It is so much worse that only people growing up after the change can accept it.