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Comment by emerongi | Hacker News Reader

After the rural buses here were made free, the companies that own the buses started inflating the passenger amounts. The subsidies were in part dependent on how many passengers are taking the bus - to avoid paying for bad/inefficient routes - and of course it immediately got taken advantage of.

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They cannot inflate the numbers. There is a (free) card system. When boarding the bus you have to validate the ticket. The ticket system is handled by a separate company, not by the bus companies.

That seems pointless. Why make everyone carry around a card that has no purpose for the user. Why not just let the government design all the routes and manage it.

In Tallinn, Estonia, free public transport is for city residents only, which pay local taxes. You get a “city resident card” that you use on public transport to get a free ride. Everyone else pays as normal

You can track the flow of people within your own country, you could even display full buses in realtime and send a notification to get the next one. And most important: you can differentiate locals from tourists.

Do you have to "check out" when you get off the bus? If not, how could you track the flow and the amount of people on each bus?

You do not have to check out when getting off of the bus.

You could do all of this, except the last one, with simple image recognition or even an optical barrier (to some degree of precision)

Cards are even simpler than that.

Why do that if you can do it with simple plastic cards

Which assumes that people wont try to trick the system, which is a different kind of beast in public transport.

Also: in nations that had communist regimes in them, public cameras with facial recognition (biometric tracking of humans through their habitat) are for some reason not nearly as popular as in the parts of the west. A west that is still naive enough to believe they will have democracy indefinitly without ever doing anything for it, while providing all the perfect technology for any next extremist takeover including racial genocide.

We like to think our institutions will save us and they can’t be broken in a changing technological landscape, but like with denying climate change these are the arguments of an optimistic gambler, and not of somebody who thought about the risk and decided it is not big.

Helps keep companies from lying about number of people using the lines. Makes sense honestly.

So you can grant free transport to residents but still make tourists pay. Also so you can monitor the system and improve it by tracking rider numbers on the routes. See which routes need more busses. If the bus companies are private, the government can pay them based on passengers for example.

Public transport is designed based on data. The cards make the equivalent of car counting wires on roads.

To keep track of how the system is used maybe. What lines are popular and what lines can be reduced.

There are many simple solutions to that, from cameras and image recognition to creating semi-public companies that handle the bus lines. If the private companies are happy to commit fraud to increase their benefits no one should be surprised when they lose their contracts.

Seems plausibly easy enough to solve at least partly with some technology. The article states that tourists and non-residents still need to pay, so I guess they still have a ticketing system. Just issue yearly cards to eligible citizens and use that to track ridership

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