BART’s excursion fare: Agency earns millions from passengers not riding trains
sf.streetsblog.org
sf.streetsblog.org
This is in case you decide not to take the train, or forgot something at home.
I suspect the excursion fare today is trying to disincentivize the use of the trains and stations as shelters by the unhoused. But others have pointed out that it is to prevent fare hacking, also.
If you had to be allowed to exit via emergency doors then they wouldn't be very good emergency doors. They're not going to chase after you :)
"Jump the turnstile, never pay the toll / Doo-wah diddy and bust in with the pre-roll"
(There’s at least one other situation where you might be authorized to use the emergency gates sans emergency: a few of the stations have the elevators to the platform outside the paid area for some bizarre reason, so when transiting the station by elevator you have to go through the fare gates and then immediately leave via the emergency exit to get to the train!)
Will that result in a charge or other problem?
(On the London Underground, it would result in a charge, as the system is designed to assume you exited somewhere but somehow managed to leave without tapping out.)
Are they not present sometimes? Yes. Are they slow / overrun by people? Sometimes. But that has little to do with the fare.
Even worse: they're asking NON-riders to see an agent twice
Presumably on the second entry you will be riding the train.
On day one there was no noticeable symptom. But if your Oyster only had a season ticket for outer Zones and your route was via Zone 1 the system had surcharged you, and when you tried to travel the next day the Oyster has negative balance, you can't use it until you pay off the excess. This infuriated some travellers, when in reality they had actually been cheating (presumably in most cases without realising) previously.
Today Oyster can actually track if you insist on taking the long route, you tap pink validators at key interchanges you'd need to pass through to do your slower and less central route avoiding Zone 1, and the system will go OK, fair enough, you really did go the long way so keep your money. I expect very few people do this.
I doubt this. Even as a child I knew that a travelcard must be valid for all the zones you travel through. Of course, if challenged, someone knowingly cheating would claim they didn't realise.
> you tap pink validators at key interchanges > you'd need to pass through to do your slower > and less central route avoiding Zone 1"
Wow! I had no idea this was a thing. I moved away from London in 2010, and now I'm curious to know whether this was implemented before or after I left.
I used this frequently at some point, but it is now so long ago I can't remember where. Especially with many London Overground routes, it's not necessarily slower.
https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets...
[Edited to add: Stupid web site doesn't have working fragment markers, click "Same Station Exits" near the top... ]
In practice, as it explains elsewhere on the site, these charges are mostly to discourage attempted fare evasion, and if you're a regular user who just does this once in a while it'll delete the journeys after it decides this isn't suspicious after all, otherwise you need to talk to a human if you really didn't travel anywhere.
I wonder: if there were better enforcement of fares in San Francisco, would public transport be better? Right now, I almost never use public transport in SF because ~100% of my journeys would take 2x to 3x as long as they do by car. This is very sad for me, having previously lived in two cities with excellent public transport (London and Beijing).
> I suspect the excursion fare today is trying to disincentivize the use of the trains and stations as shelters by the unhoused.
Time limits around entry exit could be useful here, where you can exit within 10 minutes of entry there is no charge. Reason for exiting at the same station for me is the train is delayed by 30 minutes and I forgot to check the next train before entering the station.
More stories on excursion fare: https://twitter.com/graue/status/1554998671384756229
> You can request an excursion fare refund with Clipper.
This is true and wasn’t mentioned in the article, but should have been.
That doesn't explain why they didn't add this when migrating to the Clipper card, but I feel like "nobody thought to change it" or "we wanted to reduce risk by not introducing changes while migrating" seem like more likely explanations than malice.
Also, Clipper cards have been around many years. They aren't a recent addition to BART.
by taking money from those weaker than it, since it is a large well financed organization and the people riding it will not be equipped to fight it (legally), that's malicious.
Having worked in, for, and around governments, this was almost certainly an oversight that hasn’t been a big enough of a fire in comparison to the other fires.
Making a public stink about it makes it a bigger fire though, so the system is working as intended!
Assuming a value system in which certain acts are wrong even if not observed / punished, some acts can be rational _and_ malicious.
(This isn't intended to say anything either way about BART's actions here, which are obviously not the same as literal robbery; I'm mainly disputing the idea that rational acts can't be malicious.)
What if you use the phone app and don't have a physical card with you?
For example, suppose you have a nice camera you want to sell to a friend. They live in Millbrae and commute to SF by BART. You live in north San Jose.
So you agree to meet them on their way home from work, at 6pm right outside the Powell Street station. That's $16.80 for your Berryessa to Powell Street round trip.
But what if you met inside the station instead? For your purposes, that's fine too. You can hand them the camera in either place. Should that trip be free because you enter and leave the BART system at Berryessa? I would say no, because getting to SF was valuable to you, plus you used a seat on two BART trains.
Though I guess people would just tap in, tap out immediately but don't exit the turnstiles, then just get on a train and exit through the emergency exit at whatever station you want for free.
Sure, or just jump the turnstiles and exist through the emergency exit on the other end, which I already see people do frequently.
What's much more common than that rare scenario is that, after paying a fare, you get down to the platform only to find that there's a long delay in the system, there are too many people trying to get on the trains, or something similar that causes you to leave the station to find saner transport. I've been bitten by this on BART, more than once. At stations in the heart of the city you "start the trip" triggering the fare long before you can see any of the platforms to know whether or not you should enter.
Back to the point. The problem isn't that you're wrong in asserting a valuable excursion trip is possible, but that you use that fact to rationalize the charging of a fare while ignoring the much more common cases where you'd charge a fare while delivering no value for money. Once you consider the complete picture it becomes clear that the right thing to do is build policy around the common case, not the rare/hypothetical one. It would be better to eat the cost of the rare valuable trip BART should charge for so that they don't charge people for trips they couldn't actually deliver.
However, what the original article said is different. It said the excursion fare "exists solely to make money" and "it is a scam" (emphasis mine). As if there is no conceivable rationale at all for the existence of excursion fares and the only possible way to see it is that BART is simply greedy.
BART may be greedy, or maybe they're just not seeing the balance of pros and cons. I don't know. I thought the article went overboard in being so confident that BART's motives are definitely nefarious.
TLDR: It's not that I'm favor of the excursion fare; it's that I'm against articles with hyperbolic melodrama.
The solution in absence of an attendant. Jump the barriers.
I especially think that, if there's a service disruption, track maintenance, cancelled train, etc, BART should _automatically_ know not to apply an excursion fee, rather than hoping that most riders won't ask for a station agent to waive it.
It's almost always showing:
- Elevator updates
- PSAs
- Literally nothing!
Train times are shown for a few seconds at a time! Miss it, and prepare to watch text scroll slowly until the train times popup again for a few seconds. They're also announcing the exact same PSAs audibly, which is great and more accessible anyway.
I remember people talking bout this ages ago (like, 20 years ago). You keep two bart cards going, and use the same one to enter and leave the same station. If there's a same-station charge, you can use it to enter/leave a nearby station, avoiding the higher fee for longer trips.
Is there a possibility that the same-fare charge is kept around to prevent this hack?
Obviously, this is not a realistic solution - building new exit gates is simply not worth it.
Practically, such behavior if done repeatedly can be detected as an anomaly in card usage patterns, and a human reviewer can surely figure out what you're doing.
Absent some sort of ranged tag detection (e.g., NFC or RFID), exit determination is exceedingly difficult. I'd argue that NFC/RFID operating beyond a few cm range are themselves a major infosec threat and privacy invasion.
Well, if you have someone going the opposite route, you could swap tickets at either endpoint (or at a transfer station in between.)
> Is there a possibility that the same-fare charge is kept around to prevent this hack?
I'm pretty sure that's why the excursion fare exists.
https://twitter.com/JaniceForBART/status/1555034168962138112
Rebecca Saltzman (another BART board member) says it's technical execution that prevents the change more so than the board.
They should absolutely remove these, totally insane these fees exist in 2022.
I guess it's too expensive (or "not equitable") to take the time to enforce rules that you've created. And we are too nice to create firm but unpopular rules for things that do come up.
I tried finding someone but there was no staff. I emailed them and no response.
I now chalk it up to the "SF hates you" tax I pay every time I visit.
As I always say: One of the richest parts of the richest state of the richest nation on this planet and we have ... BART. How is this possible?
So, BART was originally constructed for the purposes of suburban commuters heading into San Francisco for white-collar work with generous no-travel times baked in for maintenance. It's why there's no track duplication: if you're shutting down fully for hours you have plenty of time to work on maintenance. Almost immediately this assumption proved false, the hours got extended but the basic design is still in place. And, if you're really, really rich here you'd pay someone to drive you. Why futz with the BART? All you, the rarefied wealthy, need to do is keep BART limping along just enough that the service workers and middle class white-collar people and what not you rely on can get to work.
It's how we get BART, it's how we get a serious housing shortage.
Look at how much private transportation improved (taxis -> uber).
Besides, BART is the last of SF's problems, I'd rank homelessness and crime higher.
I think there are bigger issues we can focus on with BART. The should focus on fixing the signaling so we can get more trains through the Transbay tunnel. We should make BART more reliable and finish the San Jose extension on time and under budget.
I'm very supportive complaining about public transit and services in general, but making sure that BART provides excellent service for people who change their mind at the last moment, doesn't seem like the best use of their limited resources.
This was common for me in Philly. I'd pay to get onto the station platform then spend 30 minutes waiting for a train that is supposed to come every 10. Then upon realizing it would never come I'd end up with the double penalty of not getting a refund from SEPTA as well as having to pay for an Uber. Only to the get chewed out by my boss at comcast for walking in at 9:45.
Meanwhile all the people coming from the suburbs with an hour long delay would get a pass just because they don't live in the city.
1. The MUNI "A" Fast Pass doesn't charge excursion fares inside SF. If you commute regularly in SF, the Type A Fast Pass is a great option, especially if you can get a subsidy from work.
2. Otherwise, a Bart attendant can scan your ticket, see that you recently entered and let you out for free, and fix your account so you can get back in without hassle.
I'm just saying this is why they came up with that fee.
Obviously any adult with a real job wouldn't stoop to such antics.
The problem though, more often than not, the agents are missing from their booths. Also doesn’t help if the exit and reentry are two different stations.
What about the same station, but on a different day?
I’ve been doing this for years and never seen this. 100% of the time they want to fix the card and peel the sticker off at the outside window, then ask me to tap in at the turnstile.
we have a different system. timed tickets....or monthly passes or day passes....wtf is this robbery.
no offense...but this is the opposite of free market principles at work...this is straight extortion
But you're right. Transit like this is rarely the free market at work in the US, though, you're right It's operated by a governmental entity. It's hard to have competing subway systems.
But BART failed, so wouldn't there be some instruction? Would you not see the many other people leaving via the emergency gate, which doesn't charge you?
I'm confused on how the same station fare is a tax on people that have other transportation options. I would agree if you said it's a tax on people that accept systems unilaterally.
New york does this but san francisco hates you, so they dont.
The proper SF solution, based on my observations, is to just jump the turnstiles every time, going in or going out. I've watched guys camped out on the floor shooting up in clear view of the attendant, I assume if that flies they probably won't chase you down for just jumping a turnstile. (Yes, I do pay every time I ride BART, and yes I have been bitten by this stupid goddamn charge, and no there wasn't any attendant at the station to fix it)
>BART's Excursion Fare is $6.20 (for a Clipper Card) or $6.70 (regular adult paper ticket).
>The excursion fare set on January 1, 2020 is $6.40 for Clipper and $6.90 for paper tickets.