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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.
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);}
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.
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.
Of course you don't, but we already knew that 'cause you're a self-declared freeloading cunt.
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.
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 :|
Ooh, a thief with a back story. How original.
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.
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/
"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.