{"id":159569,"date":"2010-01-09T19:24:03","date_gmt":"2010-01-10T00:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.skyscrapercity.com\/showthread.php?t=1041929"},"modified":"2010-01-09T19:24:03","modified_gmt":"2010-01-10T00:24:03","slug":"honor-payment-system-fare-dodging-and-what-to-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/159569","title":{"rendered":"Honor payment system, fare dodging and what to do about it"},"content":{"rendered":"
I want to start another thread on an operational issue of public transit. A lot of PT systems, especially mid-to-low capacities ones, operate under an honor system, where payment is done users without any throughout control at gates\/entrance points.<\/p>\n

Of course, this leaves the road open to a variety of abuses, hence conductors and supervisors are put in place to check whether users had paid accordingly. In certain cases, like long-distance few-stoppings trains, this control is fair easy to be done: a pair of conductors can check a whole train seating 300+ withouth much hassle.<\/p>\n

However, in case of more urban commuter systems, controlling proper ticketing is not so easy. Most subways, being closed-thight systems, put gates in place instead of honor payment collection.<\/p>\n

Trams, buses and commuter rail have a harder time implementing either an all-gated design and throughout inspection (one that gives a high – say, >80% – probability of being inspect at any journey). As a result, fare dodging increase and put a strain on a system’s finances.<\/p>\n

In many cities, determined cronic fare-evaders know a number of tactics to doge the farebox and avoid being caught\/punished. Tourist internet forums are full of information on whether tourists can play the "out of town" card or not in different cities. In some routes\/services where control is rather rare, cronic evaders can even fight or harass inspectors, like late-night bus routes that usually goes unchecked, therefore generating a falsa "entitlement" perception that cash-strapped teenagers can ride them for free to\/from their hangout areas. Some racial oversensitive activist even tried to sue some transit authorities claiming that it is unfair to concentrate inspectors in routes serving mostly poor minorities. <\/p>\n

On-spot fines seem to be one of the best remedies agains fare evasion, but in some jurisdictions (countries, states, citites) transit conductors have no legal power to demand payment for alleged infractions, and in others the allegedly offender must be given an opportunity to a hearing if he\/she chooses to. Nonetheless, even high on-spot fines would not deter dodgers if the chance of being caught is slim.<\/p>\n

In those cases (like uban buses or trams) a majority of people will comply and pay the fares, yet some groups will simple ignore it. I’ve lived in cities with such a system, and troubled\/strange teens and the extremely poor used to ride buses for extreme long journeys instead of taking the subway, because there was virtually no control on the buses. For these people, some unpaid transit citations\/fines will not do any difference – they will not pay and they will keep riding transit.<\/p>\n

There are also other problems: students usually have some kind of discount or free acess on school days, but some of them don’t bother at all to use, improperly, their passes to ride transit on Sundays, or on vacation period. In one of the places I lived, inspectors paid little attention to these cases, and never bother to round up teens travelling without tickets during summer vacations (when they were supposed to pay a fare like everyone else).<\/p>\n

With more advanced and modern controls and collection systems, such as enhanced gates, RFID card etc., wouldn’t it make sense to vastly adopt gate collection systems and scrap honor systems altogether? They are not dodge-proof, but I’d say the number of people who would be willing to jump turnstiles and gates is far lower than the number of people playing cat-and-mouse evasion with fare inspectors.<\/p>\n

What do you think about it? It fare dodging a problem in your city? Has transit autorithies come with credible plans to curb this "free rider" (literally) behavior?<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want to start another thread on an operational issue of public transit. A lot of PT systems, especially mid-to-low capacities ones, operate under an honor system, where payment is done users without any throughout control at gates\/entrance points. Of course, this leaves the road open to a variety of abuses, hence conductors and supervisors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}