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A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares
- nchuhoai 13y agoI like the technical ingenuity, but do we really need to hack this system? I'm not debating the legitimacy of BART's cash flows, but IMO, the distance based system is the fairest system I can think of, closely correlating usage of resources with payments
- feralmoan 13y agoIt assumes that everyone has the same starting balance also, so the most efficient would be a crosspairing of commuters within the turnstiles at each destination. Way too complicated but maybe a fun thought experiment.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ealdent 13y agoThere isn't even much technical ingenuity here. I'm not sure how this is even noteworthy. You save $1 between two people? So you split it for a lousy $0.50 or maybe $100 per year? Just stop drinking lattes and you'll save that in a month. Not to mention if you live further away, you deserve to pay more to make up for the extra resources needed to move you around, as nchuhoai said.
- Aloisius 13y agoThe best route appears to save $2.05 each direction according to https://github.com/asifhaque/transit-arbitrage/blob/master/data/sf/arbitrage.txt https://github.com/asifhaque/transit-arbitrage/blob/master/d...: [orinda => pittsburg] + [walnut-creek => pleasant-hill]: 2.05 (35.6522%) [orinda => pittsburg] + [walnut-creek => concord]: 2.05 (35.6522%) [orinda => pittsburg] + [pleasant-hill => concord]: 2.05 (35.6522%) Though who knows if anyone actually takes these routes. And remember many of the places BART goes aren't exactly filled with people with large disposable incomes who can stop drinking "lattes" to make up the difference.
- hamburglar 13y agoI must not understand his methodology, because if you're willing to meet at an interim stop (as in the examples above), then it's easy to save quite a bit more than $2.05 just by swapping with someone who is taking almost exactly the opposite route as you. For example, if you're making the long trip from San Bruno to North Concord / Martinez, that'll cost you $6.95. If someone is traveling from Pittsburg to South San Francisco (almost exactly the opposite route), then that would normally cost them $6.70. But if you notice that their destination is one stop from your starting point, and vice versa, then you can meet up at any station in between and swap tickets, so the ticket you started with travels from San Bruno to South SF ($3.10) and their ticket travels from Pittsburg to North Concord / Martinez ($1.85). Instead of paying a combined $13.65, you pay a combined $4.95. What am I missing? Are those twitter data scientists just not that bright? ;)
- Aloisius 13y agoOrinda => Pittsburg is going the same way and on the same line as Walnut-Creek => Pleasant-Hill, Walnut-Creek => Concord and Pleasant-Hill => Concord (the East-bound Pittsburg Bay Point train). There is no need to get off the train in order to swap tickets. You are of course right though that you can save far more money if you do get off and swap with someone going the opposite way, but then you have to wait for another train. If you already get off the train in order to transfer (say you commute from Pittsburg to Fremont), then swapping cards with someone going the opposite direction is easy.
- jaredsohn 13y agoAgreed. Also on the personal level, while it could save you some money, you're not only offsetting mass transit funds to the taxpayers (or other passengers), but also taking a risk that the card you are trading for is from where they say it was from and that it contains the amount of money the other person claimed. You're also potentially (haven't thought through all of the details yet) losing out on the convenience to tie your Clipper card with your credit card, take advantage of BART high value cards ($64 value for $60), and being able to take advantage of paying for transit in pre-tax dollars. And unless this could be made very simple, you're going through a lot of daily stress just to save a very small amount of money which can distract you from doing things that give you more value.
- phillmv 13y ago>Also on the personal level, while it could save you some money, you're not only offsetting mass transit funds to the taxpayers (or other passengers) I know people felt personally slighted with the Google Bus protests, but with stuff like this it's too easy to criticize "valley behaviour".
- fakename 13y agoHack the newspaper business by paying for one newspaper and then taking them all!
- krallja 13y agoHack the movie theater by buying one ticket but going into two movies!
- fakename 13y agoHack your insurance policy by lying about your smoking!
- at-fates-hands 13y agoI believe the hack is buying one ticket and then going to the back door and letting in 10 of your friends.
- oh_sigh 13y agoWhen I was young, those crazy kids would buy two tickets and enter the theatre. Then, one person would exit with both stubs, give one to a friend waiting outside, and then repeat the process for as many friends as one had.
- fakename 13y agoHack grocery store self-checkouts by ringing up lobster as potatoes!
- GuiA 13y agoWhen I first moved to SF as a poor grad student doing a summer internship, your Clipper card could go in the negative (for example if you had $2 on it and took a $5 route, you'd be at -$3). Getting a new Clipper card was only something like $1.50; if you took the Caltrain/BART often (expensive routes), it'd almost always be advantageous to buy a clipper card with as little cash on it as possible, toss your card away when it was in the negative and just buy a new one every time. I wish Fast Company had written an article about me at the time :( (and this was "legal" too, whereas the technique described in the article is illegal since you're not allowed to transfer payment titles, per BART's/Muni's policies) (I believe you can't do that anymore - that the maximum negative balance that you can get to is now the same as the price of a new Clipper card)
- Zikes 13y agoI wish Fast Company had written an article about me at the time :( Not enough Big Data.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI always thought it was pretty grim that Boston's "Charlie Card" was named after a man who was 'trapped' in the subway system because he couldn't afford to pay his way out.
- ars 13y agoCharlie is not a real person, it's a song.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoYeah, I should have made that clearer in my comment. I still think it's a bit morbid.
- silencio 13y agoThe minimum balance required to enter is now $1.75, which I think is the minimum BART fare. (The minimums depend on which transit system you use.) You can't go negative at all, so you have to add your fare to the card before you can leave. But a lot of this was due to the fact that they had no Clipper loading capability inside the fare gates as far as I can tell. The signs announcing the change seemed to come up at the same time the old add fare machines were retrofitted with Clipper. On the bright side, BART does offer small discounts based on usage (which only makes sense for a distance-based fare, as opposed to weekly/monthly passes) so there's that.
- krallja 13y agoThe two passengers are going in opposite directions, so when would they ever have a chance to switch passes? Are they supposed to get off their trains and meet each other on the platform, then wait for another train? Sounds like a stupid amount of work to steal 85 cents.
- jaredsohn 13y agoI was confused when I read that at first, too. The second person is coming from the opposite direction, which means they are already on the train when you get on.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Aloisius 13y agoThe article is wrong. The two people are going the same direction on a Richmond-bound train which travels from Milbrae through Glen Park to Embarcadero and onto Berkeley. There is also an example of doing the same thing on DC's Metrorail.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y agoThis is quite possibly the most silicon valley headline I've ever seen.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago"Out of 60,334 of these route pairs, Haque says that switching mid-route for 4,666 of them could save at least $1 together." Two things. First, that's an awfully low number of people who could take advantage of this hack. Second, You're going to save $1??? Not sure the savings to effort ratio on this one really makes sense.
- peterwwillis 13y agoIf saved both ways that's $2/day. Assuming you worked 40 hours a week and got two weeks vacation (which most minimum wage people don't, and part timers don't get any paid vacation), you'd save $702 a year, or about 4% of the post-tax income for a minimum wage worker in San Francisco. Not everyone gets to work 40 hours a week. A recent study showed as many as 39,000 San Franciscans could be getting paid below minimum wage (which is the highest in the nation) [1]. Even if you did, this map[2] shows how many minimum wage jobs you'd need to rent in San Francisco (hint: more than 3) Still think it's not worth saving a couple bucks a day? [1] http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2013-04/sfs-minimum-wage-highest-in-the-nation-eludes-thousands-as-enforcement-effo http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2013-04/sfs-minimum-wage-highe... [1] http://sfist.com/2013/09/18/map_youd_need_to_work_5_minimum_wag.php http://sfist.com/2013/09/18/map_youd_need_to_work_5_minimum_...
- at-fates-hands 13y agoWaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too many points in this argument to address so I'll try to keep it on point to my assertion its now worth the effort: So you save $2/day for a week = $14 (I was generous and gave you all 7 days even though most people I know work 5 days and even minimum wage workers don't work 7 days a week, every week, for a full year) $14 x 3 remaining weeks in a month = $42 $42 x 11 remaining months of the year (this means they're doing this every day without fail, both ways, for a full year and successfully finding some to trade with everyday. Not sure those odds are in your favor, but whatever.) = $462 Considering you pointed out the high cost of living in San Francisco (I'm going to skip over the fact of why minimum wage workers would live in such a high rent area, but that's a different argument), I would expect $14 wouldn't go very far. As such, having to hustle every single day, without fail for a full year to save what I consider a minimal amount of money that could be saved either by sharing a BART pass, biking, using a hybrid car, or a myriad other means that don't require a constant effort on my part. I would simply look to other ways to save money. Like someone once told me, "Work smarter, not harder, fool."
- kens 13y agoLooks like it risks $250 fine for: (2) Misuse of a transfer, pass, ticket, or token with the intent to evade the payment of a fare. See California Penal Code 640(c)(2) http://www.sacrt.com/penalcode.stm http://www.sacrt.com/penalcode.stm
- oh_sigh 13y agoBut neither user that swaps is attempting to evade payment of a fare - they are both paying fares at the end of their trip. Of course, a judge would probably laugh at you and find you guilty in 15 seconds with a "logical" argument like that.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> But neither user that swaps is attempting to evade payment of a fare - they are both paying fares at the end of their trip. They are attempting to evade (part of) the fare for the trip they are actually taking.
- placeybordeaux 13y agoPerson A is evading paying one fare and paying a seperate one which they were never asked to pay.
- Fomite 13y agoWhy do I think the time spent on this will never, ever be made up by BART savings, theoretical or otherwise.
- shaunrussell 13y agocan we all agree to stop using the term "hack" like this?
- jimktrains2 13y agoWhy? This was a novel way of doing something, a hack.
- kyleblarson 13y agoWhy not just jump the turnstile? There really is no difference between this and his "hack".
- azinman2 13y agoSwapping clipper cArds makes no sense as you typically have money stored on it. In high school taking Bart during summer to Berkeley (cus I'm a nerd who took optional summer school at cal) I would clone my Bart cards. The magnetic stripe is redundant horizontally. Take one hard with a nickel on it and rub off its magnetic strip with an exacto knife. Take another with $20 on it, use the knife to cut its and the aligned 5c stripe in half, then swap and place a single scotch tape stripe in the back to affix them. Pop it in the machine, add 10cents, and out pops a new card with $20.10.
- deckar01 13y ago1. Some people put a month of fares on their Clipper card. 2. People will think you are a bum if you approach them on Bart trying to swap your tickets.
- usaar333 13y agoThe effects of a nonlinear, with respect to distance, fare structure. In other news, a rich and poor person could save a lot on taxes by 1099'ing a middle class person, taking the tax deduction, and paying for the middle class person's increased taxes. Just as illegal of course.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bri3d 13y agoWhy is the perceived outcome of the publication of this strategy or "fare sharing apps" a realignment of fare rates? I think a negative outcome like biometric fare cards is equally as likely. Note that I don't think either outcome is probable and also find the entire publication and article entirely ridiculous.
- michaelt 13y agoThis, he writes, might force "monopolistic" public transit systems to become more efficient by eliminating the possibility of route swapping--like by charging a flat rate per trip, as New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority does. Or they could adopt a fee per minute of travel, or a fee for entering or exiting a turnstile, as regardless of the ticket swaps the number of travel minutes and turnstile turns remains constant. Alternately, if they switched to an unmarked electronic ticket, so you couldn't tell if someone was offering you a valid or invalid ticket, the information asymmetry could cause bad tickets to drive out the good.
- ColinWright 13y agoIn the UK train fares are not a metric. Specifically, sometimes travelling A to B then B to C is cheaper than getting a ticket direct from A to C. For example ... Just about two years ago I had a return journey from near Liverpool in the North West of England to Exmouth, in the extreme South West. The simple return ticket was about £115. However a return Liverpool to Cheltenham was about £50, and a return Cheltenham to Exmouth was about £45, so I saved about £20, and didn't even have to change trains. It's against the terms and conditions to scrape the official web sites for fare and timetable information, so clearly I wouldn't write a script to do that and then search for optimally priced combinations, even though I spend about £9000 every year on rail travel and could save about £3500 a year.
- vmilner 13y ago"clearly I wouldn't write a script to do that and then search for optimally priced combinations" Another thing you wouldn't do is go to: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/split-cheap-train-tickets/ http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/split-cheap-train-tickets/
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoLittle off topic. When I first moved to SF @ 19 I looked quite young and carried my laptop in my backpack. I didn't have much cash and would pay the student/child fare to have enough $ for food. I even knew the name of a couple local high schools and their teachers so that when I would eventually get called out I wouldn't get caught in the lie. I felt pretty bad about this "hack" for awhile, but I wouldn't have been able to eat without it. Thanks MUNI for subsidizing me.
- placeybordeaux 13y agoWow this is an awful title and a fairly pointless article. They mention game theory then completely ignore that this scheme only works if both parties work together perfectly.