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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.

At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.

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Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.

It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.

It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.

Arresting people on the spot is punishment too, more arbitrary and less effective. It just seems worse?

Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.

It's not punishment-oriented. You accept that people get away with it 99% of the time and hope that 1% is enough deterrent. A punishment-oriented society insists you must be punished every time you do the thing.

BART wasn’t punishment based but before they installed turnstiles, many people simply refused to pay. It doesn’t make sense to run a transit system this way.

Transit is mostly funded by taxes and is meant to be for everyone. I don't understand your insistence that it must have a fare.

Why not fund public works through taxes and let everyone use it freely? Do you prefer toll roads and going through a toll over literally all the other roads that have no fare? Are roads worse because stupid and poor people can use them too?

Oh, and funny note, most toll roads in the US are in a weird system where you paid for it's construction with your taxes and then that infrastructure is basically gifted to a company.

Well, roads all have user fees here

Fareless options have been tried before and it comes out to that it makes problems with antisocial behaviour even worse. So I'd say we should just charge fares that cover actual costs, and then for people who can't afford that, provide subsidised fares.

The biggest benefit of fare gates is keeping out troublemakers. For whatever reason there is a large overlap between those who don't pay their fare and those who sexually harass other passengers, leave large messes, or vandalize.

The other method of suppressing quality of life crimes and fare evasion is lots of transit cops. It's probably cheaper to install the gates than hire lots of transit cops and arresting people over fare evasion makes the city/transit agency look like bad guys.

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260518

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