10 ms·

The additional bit of information is that often the ticketing systems make up a non trivial fraction of the overall cost of running the transportation network.

The additional bit of information is that often the ticketing systems make up a non trivial fraction of the overall cost of running the transportation network. Often these systems are implemented by large international consortia who funnel money from the public. Take Melbourne for example implementation of their chip card system ran much over budget and was 1.5 billion AUD in the end [1]. That doesn't mean making public transport free always makes sense, but it would eliminate some of the large rentseekers from the system. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki

Joakal 5y ago
Also less injuries/settlements and criminal records from hiring private security with powers of police who have no police training.
- vkou 5y ago
  'No police training' for ticket checkers might actually be a feature.
stephencoyner 5y ago
Drivers also face violence for enforcing fares (however many agencies now ask them not to because of this). Handling cash adds a huge cost as well in addition to the electronic systems. Lots of friction across the board
- Raed667 5y ago
  In the town I live (Nice, FR) the drivers don't enforce fares. You can completely bypass them and they won't look twice at you. However, there are "control" squads, basically a large group of +6 feet guys in uniform that will randomly hop on tramways, trains, buses and do ticket checks.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    > +6 feet guys in uniform that will randomly hop on tramways I know I'm adding nothing to the discussion, but I couldn't stop myself from giggling at alternative interpretations of this fragment.
    - Raed667 5y ago
      I'm not familiar at all with the imperial system (as you can guess), but I tried to make it more accessible to HN Edit: Ohhh now I get it :D
      - guggle 5y ago
        It took me a while too :-P
        teekert 5y ago
        https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/teddyruxpin/images/6/6b/Grubby_Octopede.png/revision/latest?cb=20180428013557 https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/teddyruxpin/images/6/6b/...
        StavrosK 5y ago
        No no, they don't have extra legs, just more feet randomly on their body.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Exactly the same in Lyon but the control squads are more around 5'6. Edit: a ticket is around 2€ and can be used for an hour as much as you want, and then you can finish the last "trip" you started in the hour. The fine for not having a ticket validated is 60€.
    - Raed667 5y ago
      Must be the mediterranean weather /s
- SilverRed 5y ago
  At least where I am, they don't accept cash (you must pay for credit before boarding) and they don't enforce tickets. Separate ticket inspectors go around checking tickets.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
In germany there is minimal payment infra, but civil dressed cops will make you pay randomly a heavy fine if they catch you.
- f6v 5y ago
  Are those cops really? Anyway, those people always act like thugs. I wish there was no need for them.
- nielsole 5y ago
  > civil dressed cops They are not cops. The only reason they can demand showing the ticket is because of the terms of service.
- jamil7 5y ago
  It's worth mentioning it is a criminal offense but there is a scale for repeat offenders. The first time the fine is not that much but by repeatedly evading fares you can eventually end up with community service or jail time. There is talk of decriminalizing it due to the overhead of this too and the fact that it hasn't really worked and mostly targets vulnerable people.
- nicbou 5y ago
  They found out that this is cheaper and more efficient than turnstiles. I saw the paper a long time ago, because I couldn't believe it.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Cops or people employed by the transportation provider? I only saw civil employees in my life so far.
- sajithdilshan 5y ago
  I think the fine is same as in France (60 Euros for Schwarzfahren) or at least in Munich it's 60 Euros.
Closi 5y ago
That seems to be an exceptionally mis-managed case - for instance London’s Oyster card cost approximately 10% of that about 10 years earlier. Depreciated over 10 years, that system was responsible for c2% of costs and presumably had some benefits, so although it’s definitely a crazy waste of money it might not be a huge cost-driver. I suspect there are much more costs than the system for fare collection more generally though to your wider point, such as inspectors, workers assisting people at the ticketing gates, longer bus stop turnaround time as people clock into the system etc
- dtech 5y ago
  Holland introduced a nationwide RFID based public transport pass ~13 years ago. It had similar problems, probably mostly caused by incompetence, e.g. it was all based on an expensive, obsolete and insecure "Mifare Classic" RFID chip because the transport minister went to visit Oyster and that was what used there. Leaving aside that that system was fully deployed a decade earlier. The chip was obsolete and cracked before it was fully rolled out.
- Quarrelsome 5y ago
  I have direct experience of that specific implementation and you are correct in that it was exceptionally mis-managed. Even in its inception, it was stupid, some company sells to Melbourne and outsources the business logic to Switzerland and outsources the rest of the app to a UK firm. Idk if you've ever worked on embedded but having to deal with an opaque third party component that is doing all the "business logic" and hogging resources (SqlCe makes this _really_ bad) really sucks on an embedded device that has been stripped down to its bare-bones to reduce the cost because the owners want to sell the business to some conglomerate ASAP. We couldn't even share resources with the opaque third party app so we couldn't use SqlCe ourselves because it blew the memory budget to have two connections open and we couldn't use Sqlite because of old visual basic architects that are stupid and are terrified of anything that isn't microsoft. Also none of that matters because the architecture was so insane anyway and was never going to work because the devs didn't understand the limitations of the Compact Framework and used XmlDocument as a key part of the architecture. One transition from one screen to another would load (at a minimum) two very large Xml files and the Compact Framework and the hardware just wasn't good enough to do that all the time. The entire project was built around the hope that the hardware and framework could lift a lot more than it could in practice. As an aside, I was brought in to help fix some of the debris and work on the next project (which they were going to do before the Melbourne money showed up). This was after they finally removed the "must have a degree" requirement which had bounced me the years previous. Having a degree or not wasn't the problem, the problem was the devs they employed didn't have enough embedded experience and they (like most people at the time) drastically underestimated the complexity of embedded as well as overestimated how effective the compact framework was (it kinda sucked ass tbh). Thankfully most of this doesn't matter anymore because the company I'm talking about got sold to some big firm who lost the market to an up and comer some decade later.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
That is analogous to the argument favouring UBI as a replacement for usage-restricted (food stamps, scholarships, etc.) and means-tested benefits. Leaving aside the debate on whether the universality of UBI is sustainable or not, the simplicity of just giving X amount of money to each individual, no questions asked, saves a huge amount of inefficient bureaucratic overhead.
- xputer 5y ago
  While I agree with the simplicity argument, I think providing a free service is very different from giving everyone free money. UBI is likely to have many unintended consequences. For example, what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices? And what would happen to addicts who use their UBI to buy drugs instead of food and shelter?
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    That last one isn't an issue. If an addict needs help, give them medically-based, compassion-built-in free help. If they don't want help and aren't making others unsafe, it isn't my business any more than it is my business if someone donates 10% because their religious organization requires/suggests tithes. People are going to spend money in ways you don't approve of. Period, it is part of life. I truly believe that we, as a society, shouldn't let that take away something that can help a bunch of people.
    - paul_f 5y ago
      The concern many have with UBI is that society will still have to provide all the other social benefits anyway, food stamps, housing, etc, because many people who need UBI likely are not going to spend the money wisely.
  - gspr 5y ago
    The second question: asking this question about UBI is as wrong as asking it for salary. It's none of anyone's business. (Well – it's everyone's business in that society should offer addiction help for those who feel they need it, but that's not unique to UBI).
refurb 5y ago
Rent seekers? Presumably the vendor gave a ticketing system in exchange for payment, so not sure how that's "rent seeking"? Are there rules that they can be the only provider?
- stoilt 5y ago
  > Presumably the vendor gave a ticketing system in exchange for payment Normally yes. And then there are the semi-democratic countries, like Hungary, where things happen a bit differently: https://dailynewshungary.com/further-delay-in-the-introduction-of-the-electronic-ticket-system-in-budapest/ https://dailynewshungary.com/further-delay-in-the-introducti... The article is from 2018, needless to say that in 2021 that system is still not in place...
- immibis 5y ago
  The definition of a rent seeker is someone who seeks to extract payment without adding value, so I'd say fare collection systems fall in that bucket. The value is added by the actual transport system, not the fare collection system. I suppose that's just "rent" though, not "rent seeking" unless the company that makes the system is actively trying to inflate their prices, which it sounds like this one is.
baybal2 5y ago
> Melbourne for example implementation of their chip card system ran much over budget and was 1.5 billion AUD in the end [1]. ... This is a lot! How in the world they managed to spend so much? I myself worked on a turnstile project once, and with such money you can buy 5823187.5 most feature loaded, RFID+QR reading turnstiles.
- Mandatum 5y ago
  Corruption. It's rampant in infrastructure projects in Australia. They could have just not charged anyone for public transport and they'd have SAVED money. The enforcement outweighs the revenue. Australia has a history of corruption in infrastructure and politics, it's only really started to bubble to the surface in the past 5-10 years.. But still, nothing has really been done and it's just accepted.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Let's not even get started on the private-public partnerships in Australia. Anyone want to read on a real horror-story have a look at the Sydney airport link. TLDR: (from memory so some details might be slightly off) they build a train link to the airport in a public private partnership, but estimated passenger numbers wrong. The private owner of the train stations (essentially the airport and one other one) upped the fares, so nobody would use the train and took taxi's to the airport. So what they did was add fees for taxis at the airport, so they become more expensive. That still wasn't enough, so at the end the government at to bail the private partner out with several hundred million IIRC (and the fares are still ridiculously high for going to the airport).
GoodJokes 5y ago
It is not rent seeking. Free public transport should be a human right.
jl2718 5y ago
I took an interview at the NYC MTA about 10 years ago to build a credit card system instead of the ridiculous ticket system. It was pretty cool. They had very simple and cheap solutions available, even some self-built prototypes, but ... politics. Everybody needs to make some money off of everything to pass each stage of approval. From then I started thinking always about the many revenue systems we employ that cost far more than they collect. Public transit is a big one because the cost of a customer not buying a ticket is not just the ticket price, but traffic time and road expansion and emissions and parking structures etc. It’s hard even for government agencies to capture those externalities across department budgets and mandates.
specialist 5y ago
> ticketing systems make up a non trivial fraction of the overall cost I once read that fare revenue just about covers the cost of fare collection. If true, why even bother?

Joakal 5y ago

Also less injuries/settlements and criminal records from hiring private security with powers of police who have no police training.

vkou 5y ago
'No police training' for ticket checkers might actually be a feature.

stephencoyner 5y ago

Drivers also face violence for enforcing fares (however many agencies now ask them not to because of this). Handling cash adds a huge cost as well in addition to the electronic systems. Lots of friction across the board

Raed667 5y ago
In the town I live (Nice, FR) the drivers don't enforce fares. You can completely bypass them and they won't look twice at you. However, there are "control" squads, basically a large group of +6 feet guys in uniform that will randomly hop on tramways, trains, buses and do ticket checks.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  > +6 feet guys in uniform that will randomly hop on tramways I know I'm adding nothing to the discussion, but I couldn't stop myself from giggling at alternative interpretations of this fragment.
  - Raed667 5y ago
    I'm not familiar at all with the imperial system (as you can guess), but I tried to make it more accessible to HN Edit: Ohhh now I get it :D
    - guggle 5y ago
      It took me a while too :-P
      - teekert 5y ago
        https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/teddyruxpin/images/6/6b/Grubby_Octopede.png/revision/latest?cb=20180428013557 https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/teddyruxpin/images/6/6b/...
        StavrosK 5y ago
        No no, they don't have extra legs, just more feet randomly on their body.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Exactly the same in Lyon but the control squads are more around 5'6. Edit: a ticket is around 2€ and can be used for an hour as much as you want, and then you can finish the last "trip" you started in the hour. The fine for not having a ticket validated is 60€.
  - Raed667 5y ago
    Must be the mediterranean weather /s
SilverRed 5y ago
At least where I am, they don't accept cash (you must pay for credit before boarding) and they don't enforce tickets. Separate ticket inspectors go around checking tickets.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

In germany there is minimal payment infra, but civil dressed cops will make you pay randomly a heavy fine if they catch you.

f6v 5y ago
Are those cops really? Anyway, those people always act like thugs. I wish there was no need for them.
nielsole 5y ago
> civil dressed cops They are not cops. The only reason they can demand showing the ticket is because of the terms of service.
jamil7 5y ago
It's worth mentioning it is a criminal offense but there is a scale for repeat offenders. The first time the fine is not that much but by repeatedly evading fares you can eventually end up with community service or jail time. There is talk of decriminalizing it due to the overhead of this too and the fact that it hasn't really worked and mostly targets vulnerable people.
nicbou 5y ago
They found out that this is cheaper and more efficient than turnstiles. I saw the paper a long time ago, because I couldn't believe it.
hef19898 5y ago
Cops or people employed by the transportation provider? I only saw civil employees in my life so far.
sajithdilshan 5y ago
I think the fine is same as in France (60 Euros for Schwarzfahren) or at least in Munich it's 60 Euros.

Closi 5y ago

That seems to be an exceptionally mis-managed case - for instance London’s Oyster card cost approximately 10% of that about 10 years earlier. Depreciated over 10 years, that system was responsible for c2% of costs and presumably had some benefits, so although it’s definitely a crazy waste of money it might not be a huge cost-driver. I suspect there are much more costs than the system for fare collection more generally though to your wider point, such as inspectors, workers assisting people at the ticketing gates, longer bus stop turnaround time as people clock into the system etc

dtech 5y ago
Holland introduced a nationwide RFID based public transport pass ~13 years ago. It had similar problems, probably mostly caused by incompetence, e.g. it was all based on an expensive, obsolete and insecure "Mifare Classic" RFID chip because the transport minister went to visit Oyster and that was what used there. Leaving aside that that system was fully deployed a decade earlier. The chip was obsolete and cracked before it was fully rolled out.
Quarrelsome 5y ago
I have direct experience of that specific implementation and you are correct in that it was exceptionally mis-managed. Even in its inception, it was stupid, some company sells to Melbourne and outsources the business logic to Switzerland and outsources the rest of the app to a UK firm. Idk if you've ever worked on embedded but having to deal with an opaque third party component that is doing all the "business logic" and hogging resources (SqlCe makes this _really_ bad) really sucks on an embedded device that has been stripped down to its bare-bones to reduce the cost because the owners want to sell the business to some conglomerate ASAP. We couldn't even share resources with the opaque third party app so we couldn't use SqlCe ourselves because it blew the memory budget to have two connections open and we couldn't use Sqlite because of old visual basic architects that are stupid and are terrified of anything that isn't microsoft. Also none of that matters because the architecture was so insane anyway and was never going to work because the devs didn't understand the limitations of the Compact Framework and used XmlDocument as a key part of the architecture. One transition from one screen to another would load (at a minimum) two very large Xml files and the Compact Framework and the hardware just wasn't good enough to do that all the time. The entire project was built around the hope that the hardware and framework could lift a lot more than it could in practice. As an aside, I was brought in to help fix some of the debris and work on the next project (which they were going to do before the Melbourne money showed up). This was after they finally removed the "must have a degree" requirement which had bounced me the years previous. Having a degree or not wasn't the problem, the problem was the devs they employed didn't have enough embedded experience and they (like most people at the time) drastically underestimated the complexity of embedded as well as overestimated how effective the compact framework was (it kinda sucked ass tbh). Thankfully most of this doesn't matter anymore because the company I'm talking about got sold to some big firm who lost the market to an up and comer some decade later.

Mordisquitos 5y ago

That is analogous to the argument favouring UBI as a replacement for usage-restricted (food stamps, scholarships, etc.) and means-tested benefits. Leaving aside the debate on whether the universality of UBI is sustainable or not, the simplicity of just giving X amount of money to each individual, no questions asked, saves a huge amount of inefficient bureaucratic overhead.

xputer 5y ago
While I agree with the simplicity argument, I think providing a free service is very different from giving everyone free money. UBI is likely to have many unintended consequences. For example, what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices? And what would happen to addicts who use their UBI to buy drugs instead of food and shelter?
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  That last one isn't an issue. If an addict needs help, give them medically-based, compassion-built-in free help. If they don't want help and aren't making others unsafe, it isn't my business any more than it is my business if someone donates 10% because their religious organization requires/suggests tithes. People are going to spend money in ways you don't approve of. Period, it is part of life. I truly believe that we, as a society, shouldn't let that take away something that can help a bunch of people.
  - paul_f 5y ago
    The concern many have with UBI is that society will still have to provide all the other social benefits anyway, food stamps, housing, etc, because many people who need UBI likely are not going to spend the money wisely.
- gspr 5y ago
  The second question: asking this question about UBI is as wrong as asking it for salary. It's none of anyone's business. (Well – it's everyone's business in that society should offer addiction help for those who feel they need it, but that's not unique to UBI).

refurb 5y ago

Rent seekers? Presumably the vendor gave a ticketing system in exchange for payment, so not sure how that's "rent seeking"? Are there rules that they can be the only provider?

stoilt 5y ago
> Presumably the vendor gave a ticketing system in exchange for payment Normally yes. And then there are the semi-democratic countries, like Hungary, where things happen a bit differently: https://dailynewshungary.com/further-delay-in-the-introduction-of-the-electronic-ticket-system-in-budapest/ https://dailynewshungary.com/further-delay-in-the-introducti... The article is from 2018, needless to say that in 2021 that system is still not in place...
immibis 5y ago
The definition of a rent seeker is someone who seeks to extract payment without adding value, so I'd say fare collection systems fall in that bucket. The value is added by the actual transport system, not the fare collection system. I suppose that's just "rent" though, not "rent seeking" unless the company that makes the system is actively trying to inflate their prices, which it sounds like this one is.

baybal2 5y ago

> Melbourne for example implementation of their chip card system ran much over budget and was 1.5 billion AUD in the end [1]. ... This is a lot! How in the world they managed to spend so much? I myself worked on a turnstile project once, and with such money you can buy 5823187.5 most feature loaded, RFID+QR reading turnstiles.

Mandatum 5y ago
Corruption. It's rampant in infrastructure projects in Australia. They could have just not charged anyone for public transport and they'd have SAVED money. The enforcement outweighs the revenue. Australia has a history of corruption in infrastructure and politics, it's only really started to bubble to the surface in the past 5-10 years.. But still, nothing has really been done and it's just accepted.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Let's not even get started on the private-public partnerships in Australia. Anyone want to read on a real horror-story have a look at the Sydney airport link. TLDR: (from memory so some details might be slightly off) they build a train link to the airport in a public private partnership, but estimated passenger numbers wrong. The private owner of the train stations (essentially the airport and one other one) upped the fares, so nobody would use the train and took taxi's to the airport. So what they did was add fees for taxis at the airport, so they become more expensive. That still wasn't enough, so at the end the government at to bail the private partner out with several hundred million IIRC (and the fares are still ridiculously high for going to the airport).

GoodJokes 5y ago

It is not rent seeking. Free public transport should be a human right.

jl2718 5y ago

I took an interview at the NYC MTA about 10 years ago to build a credit card system instead of the ridiculous ticket system. It was pretty cool. They had very simple and cheap solutions available, even some self-built prototypes, but ... politics. Everybody needs to make some money off of everything to pass each stage of approval. From then I started thinking always about the many revenue systems we employ that cost far more than they collect. Public transit is a big one because the cost of a customer not buying a ticket is not just the ticket price, but traffic time and road expansion and emissions and parking structures etc. It’s hard even for government agencies to capture those externalities across department budgets and mandates.

specialist 5y ago

> ticketing systems make up a non trivial fraction of the overall cost I once read that fare revenue just about covers the cost of fare collection. If true, why even bother?