Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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?