The United States Needs a Universal System to Pay for Public Transit
citylab.com
citylab.com
All the better to track you with, my dear.
Those drive by toll scanners are great for paying tolls. Also really great for recording, for all time, everyone who drives under them.
Standardizing a fare payment system just does the same for mass transit.
Not that there aren’t programs to add facial recognition in all these spaces which could be good enough, but why make it easy?
Until there’s a Federal privacy framework which limits the amount and duration of information the government can collect, and some reason to believe the NSA, DEA, and FBI are actually adhering to those agreements, above and beyond admissibility in court, I am staunchly opposed to any of these systems in the name of efficiency.
It needs to be illegal to use these tolling systems for surveillance, because the next “gas tax” is squaring up to be a GPS based mileage tax.
No it doesn't. Japan has a standardized mass transit fare payment system, covering close enough to the entire country, and you can get in on that with a card purchased, and topped up, completely anonymously in cash.
Your options are, travel anonymously, and pay more or risk losing the money on your fare card due to them just deciding not work anymore, loss etc. I've gone through 4 now in about three years. Two just stopped working and i lost two. They also don't give your $6 deposit back, so i've now spent an extra $24 i'll never get back, for nothing on top of the money i lost on the first two cards. I've registered them since.
Or
Get tracked constantly any and everywhere you go on transit.
Counterpoint: No it won't, necessarily. I've never had an issue with one of these IC cards (edit: in over 10 years of using them). I've lost one, that's it. I've lost more of the paper tickets _inside_ the station than that.
Do you have actual data on the failure rates of IC cards?
It's anonymous at point of top-up, that's true. But when the card is issued, an ID should be shown.
You _can_ add your name to them if you want. You don't have to.
Except for the courts which have started to tell them that they can't do that.
Many toll highways use license plate recognition to do billing for non-transponder cars.
You will be tracked, you might as well get some benefit from it, right?
CityLab is beyond parody. Yes, sure, the real problem with public transit is that jet-setting tourists have to install new apps on their iPhoneX in each city they visit.
*Anyone with a bank account. Or is this a less significant problem in the UK compared to the US?
In Sweden (in Skåne at least, since the rail/bus solutions are all regional there) you have both options. You can buy your tickets on an app that you scan on the bus or train, or you can buy a smart card anonymously with cash when there is an open newsstand/rail station and use that to beep onto trains and buses. So if you go the anonymous route when you need to top up your smart card with money you can do it with cash from a kiosk in an automated machine 24/7, so long as there is a kiosk around (every rail station has them).
With a fair bit of planning it’s not too hard to stay completely credit-card and app free with this solution. You just have to make sure that you are near an open rail station/newsstand to purchase the smartcard initially (and I think even some of the grocery stores sell them) and then onwards have enough money on the smart card to get you to where you can top up from a kiosk. Given the rail coverage in Sweden it’s not too hard to do.
The ideal system is one in which you use the "universal transit payment card" desired in the article to get on the transit system, then use it again to get off (if the transit system requires it - no all do), without having to give even a single thought to how much money you are spending.
When you have different payment cards/passes/tickets in different systems, you have to figure out not only how to buy those tickets, but how much to buy (so that you don't depart the area having vastly overbought - or so that you don't run out of loaded fare value before you end your trip).
And you can totally pay cash on the RapidRide buses, you just have to board via the front door of the bus. (If you pay with an ORCA card you can board via the back door if you want to, but if you're paying cash you have to board normally).
For BRT, you can pay cash at the time of boarding.
I travel domestically and internationally, and I always have cash - and it is almost always much more difficult than it should be to pay for public transit, just like the article says.
Most public transit riders in the U.S. don't travel much and don't try to navigate different public transit systems. This is not a problem that affects the real users of public transit in the U.S., and it's not what's holding back broader adoption of public transit.
what options would you suggest for the unbanked or those without smartphones?
Just because you haven’t handled actu al cash in a while doesn’t mean others haven’t. A large percentage of people still rely on cash transactions to get thru the day.
All I'm suggesting is that the "federal reserve note" is not as universal anymore. It's only practically useful if I have it.
Plus, people paying cash slow down the bus as they fumble for their wallets and count out their coins and such. If enough people pay cash, it slows down the bus significantly. We should be trying to get to the point where nobody pays cash when boarding buses for this reason alone.
Around here, on board the busses, they have completely automated machines that can read all the notes and dispense change automatically, they even seem pretty robust at it (crumpled bills, etc work fine) - they essentially as good a job as it's possible to do with cash.
And it still takes agonizingly longer than tapping a transit card and everyone else on the bus hates you.
Dropping an exact value coin into a machine is a solved problem, is reliable, instantaneous, has automatic redundancy in high volume locations because there will be multiple machines, protects privacy, etc.
> The agency then has to have staff to count the cash, then hire an armored car to take it to a bank. It's not that simple.
That is not a significant cost. The service is paid a small amount of money to collect a much larger amount of money, and if you do more frequent pickups then less security is required and the ratio stays low.
Meanwhile with cash you don't have to deal with chargebacks, computer intrusions, processing fees, etc.
I pay $0 for debit transactions, but anywhere from $1 to $4 for an ATM withdrawal.
It's not as if the problem is that the government doesn't actually know how to collect taxes. What you're really identifying is a different problem -- the government keeps not funding transit. But that's a completely independent problem. Look at what they do with fuel tax revenues. They're generally supposed to go to transportation but half the states spend the money trying to fill the hole in their unfunded pensions and then complain that they have no money for transportation.
The real question is, would people accept a small increase in sales or income tax in exchange for an elimination of transit fares? To which the answer is probably yes. Because even if you can't use mass transit for whatever reason, everybody loves getting other drivers off the road, which is exactly what making mass transit free would do.
If the legislature subsequently diverts the new money that was supposed to go to transit, that problem is independent and preexisting. And once mass transit is free, more people would use it, creating a larger lobby for making it better.
The only remaining conclusion is that we're spending it wrong.
This would astound me. I wonder how you square this belief with, e.g. reports like these: https://itep.org/notadime/
Because this kind of infrastructure is heavy on fixed costs. It takes money to build or operate it, but once you do, the cost of the incremental car or the incremental passenger is so close to zero that collecting a fare equal to the actual marginal cost would cost more to collect than the amount of the fare. But charging more than that would unduly discourage productive use of the infrastructure that is already being paid for.
Which means the most efficient pricing strategy is flat rate. And since ~0% of the population consists of hermits who never use any form of transportation, that makes it one of the most appropriate things to fund with taxes.
Public education improves your standard of living: do you want illiterate neighbors?
Public transit similarly improves the quality of your neighbors, enabling them to take better jobs, live in less expensive housing, contribute less to traffic, pollution, auto deaths. They have more free time to read books (can't do that while driving!) and work on hobbies, or side-businesses.
Public transit raises all boats. So, really, you're buying something _for yourself_ that's not available at any store: happier, healthier, and more competent friends, family, neighbors, teachers, clerks, politicians, mechanics, etc.
Other things you have to consider:
1. Protected classes on the value (senior, students) 2. Wage benefit classes (that's where the fare is pretaxed) 3. Transfers
Being a person that had his CC charged over his ventra card (which has a full monthly pass) this crap pisses me off.
I can't request a refund.
To Ventra.. I presented a valid payment. I accepted service and recieved service.
To the Credit card company, they're garbage. I can't opt out of a contactless card. I chewed out the CC CSR.. but they try to frame it as me being in a bad situation. ("That sounds like a terrible situation, I can understand how this can be frustrating in a big city") BTW: This is chase.
> Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia
No it wouldn't, though that would be an option. Common standards for public services don't even necessarily require a formal direct agreement between all participants, much less a central mandate.
> and it doesn't fall under their purview to provide such a program
That's... debatable. Providing for post roads (which is an important use of most public roads) is an explicit federal mandate, and promoting efficiency in the shared uses of such roads is certainly closely-enough tied to the that function to be a legitimate pursuit as part of it; tying such a standard to, e.g., federal infrastructure funding is very hard to view as illegitimate.
The chances of someone having a card that won't accept a ten quid charge is fairly minimal and TfL just ban cards that get declined.
Very roughly, age 30-60 aren't eligible for discounts. Older or younger than that are.
It should be possible for TfL to accomplish this but thus far it's not done.
When it comes to discounts, you can accomplish that by identifying the card as a discounted fare card. When it comes to a season pass, just identify the card then don't process a payment.
As for the feasibility of this, I don't know, but there is almost certainly a viable mechanism for each of these things.
The other obvious downside is more of a logistical thing: credit card transactions need connectivity. With a stored-value card system, transactions don't need a network to clear (everything's happening locally between the card and the reader); this means you don't have big backups if networks go down, you don't have a time lag waiting for transactions to clear, and you can place readers in locations where connectivity isn't guaranteed (like buses).
That said, it's not unheard-of for public transit to take standard contactless credit cards. For example, Transport for London (at least theoretically) takes contactless payment systemwide.
Yeah, though I think they could negotiate better fees given the volume (not that I think public transit authorities tend to be good at much at all without considerable public interest). I guess time will tell.
Here in Canada, I think average merchant fees for the credit part are less than 1% overall, not sure if that would end up being such a big issue; especially when compared with the cost of administering a whole new system (anti-money-laundering, fraud detection, security, development, integration, support etc. etc).
We need to centralize all the things! One organization needs to unify all other organizations.
A universal payment system serves those who travel between cities/states. Decent public transit serves everyone who commutes every day in the same city, even those who don't use the service. I imagine the second group is larger than the first.
> day, the Clipper card must handle some 35,000 fare rules that determine how much a Bay Area ride costs.
Just go fully subsidized and stop collecting fares. There problem solved. Seriously the most efficient way to do X is usually don't do X.
And I think it should be free for everyone.
I would even support being taxed in order to expand it. (Improving it isn't possible IMO.)
CMV: Roads are free, why shouldn't public transport be free?
Being able to get around should be one of those services governments provide, and they should provide people with choices in how they prefer to get around. (Different people like different things, I hate public transport, but other people don't.)