We’ll Miss You, MetroCard Machine

Meanwhile the staff just sit in their booth while twiddling their fingers.

Due to this laissez-faire attitude the whole subway system is infested with criminals. Pickpockets operate out in the open. One time I got pickpocketed I searched the bins and I found 10 discarded ID cards and driving licenses etc.

But I've never seen a subway system that wasn't like this. In Singapore perhaps with their $1000 littering fines.

Weird that they even bothered to list the app for download in the Canadian app-store.

How in the world did you figure out that trick?

Online shops will usually accept 00000, but if it asks for your zip at a physical terminal you’re screwed.

A hint ; the padding doesn't have to be zeros (for my bank, when it approves during checks). So for example if you are doing 12300, this may not be a valid zip code.

In my case, my 12300 wasn't valid. I clued into this, because the code worked in most places where it should, but not a few others. I then looked up some codes, and realised that 12300 wasn't a real zip code.

So I Googled, and tried 123xx, where xx matches a real, valid zip code.

This gets by some checks, which table-lookup against valid zip codes, before sending a request to validate the zip remotely.

Even better, I then found an address for a condemned building on that same zip code. When required, I used that address as the 'bill to' address, and even that works sometimes. Very helpful when snowbirding, and spending 4+ months in the US.

The original show (Beverly Hills, 90210) ran 1990-2000, and the remake 2008-2013.

2 minutes of new yorkers doing the double metrocard swipe. (Contains opera)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic.

And a few going over/under…

Historically they were directly functional, the first part (it doesn't matter to a machine how the code is written, but they notionally have an "Out" section first and an "In" section) SO1 told sorters which local postal sorting office to send this to, SO1 would be in Southampton, a port city on the south coast because the first two letters are somewhat mnemonic.

But today actually a machine translates post codes into numeric codes that aren't used by the general public (although they are published, and you can mechanically annotate bulk mail with the newer numeric codes for a discount). This is fortunate because once the codes were broadly accepted and used, they became a matter of vanity, like other aspects of addressing in the UK (and presumably other countries)

For example, I grew up in Prestwood, an unimportant dormitory village (ie most of the adult population work in London, and just come back to Prestwood to sleep) in Metroland. But the nicest houses in Prestwood didn't consider themselves to be "in Prestwood" at all, they'd argue that since they're on a hillside near the more notable and expensive town of Great Missenden, they're actually living in Great Missenden. And they'd insist their post codes should match this er, Truth.

So making the post codes merely a human artefact, and the real coding is numbers humans are normally unaware of, allows a house that is clearly in Prestwood to instead have an address in Great Missenden, complete with Post Code, yet the sorting people can give it to a guy whose job is to deliver to Prestwood, because that's where it actually is.

(One downside to the sort of people who live in a dormitory village, beyond the fact that they aren't really around most of the time and so don't care about lack of amenities, is that they see themselves as important and powerful and so they might waste a lot of taxpayer money demanding that some minor bureaucrat "fix" their address and it's just easier to say OK than fight them. There are upsides though, they have plenty of cash, so you get pretty good loot on Halloween and decent donations to charities)

Anyway, back to the HN relevant point, there are commercial products which can go from a post code to a list of "delivery points" (addresses, but the postal delivery people only really care about where the post is delivered to, so from their point of view that's what we're encoding) and that can be turned into a drop-down, or it can be auto-completed from the house number if that works, or whatever you customise. This is a place where you can do a poor job, produce a working product but maybe cut your purchase completion rate slightly, because your address entry is annoying and customers walk away. Or you can do a really slick job, but miss one edge edge case and find oops, buying your product from one town in Yorkshire was virtually impossible due to a bug (there's usually a manual entry option, but obviously normal users hate that and won't bother)

Blue screen shot from 2016:

https://twitter.com/nycdotnet/status/750737744356319232

Transit is very expensive and the cost / benefit needs to be decided by the public. Governments also need a plan to pay for it. But I would not say it is idiotic just because it is expensive.

It doesn't matter how expensive transit is, if the total costs of fare collection & enforcement is greater than what they collect they're better off making it free and potentially making up the small shortfall with extra taxes.

Considering a lot of these systems will be built by large consultancies specialized in milking out government contracts while delivering shoddy work, I wouldn't be surprised if fare collection was actually way more expensive that it needs to be.

I think it will really help reduce car use if transport were free. People would use it more, obviously but that would lead to more services being available. Win-win especially for the environment IMO.

Of course what I'm arguing for is making transport free officially, not fare evasion.

Houston, Texas is like that. I got checked four times in three days.

I saw non-paying people get fined on the spot. From what I could hear, it was $75.

But of course the cost of living is much lower here so it's comparable you that $2.75 in NYC.

German living in Switzerland here: What's even more expensive is delays. It's unthinkable to me how to build a high throughput station with ticket gates. And that's not even considering the need for additional fire egresses etc. involved.

Switzerland is a bit more paper-averse than Germany. 80% of people on the train hold up a QR code on their phone for the employee to scan once aboard, 10% hold up their (credit card sized) travel card for them to RFID scan, and the remaining 10% have a paper ticket.

It was simple without changing the interface to English.

That system is an outlier to the total control and surveillance that is the modern expectation/demand.

They expire quickly (12-18 months) because the magnetic stripe wears out quickly.

I have a (not directly) related hypothesis I heard stated once about vouchers and bonus programs once.

If the operator takes your $20 to buy a metro card, they made $20 of income. The $20 of "value" the card now holds is accounted for.

Assuming a metro card never expires would means that the operator would have to account for this value to be in existence for perpetuity.

If 1% of metro cards never expired but still had 20$ on them, there would be an ever-growing amount of money-to-be-accounted-for which (I've been told) is a bit of a nightmare since it's technically a liquidity, but obviously unavailable to the company.

It's obviously shitty for the customer, but there's seemingly some sort of (tax/business) logic behind it.