A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3026711/a-twitter-data-scientist-hacks-san-franciscos-subway-fares

by _pius • 12 years ago

36 55 12 years ago

nchuhoai• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

It 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.

ealdent• 12 years ago

There 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.

Aloisius3• 12 years ago

The best route appears to save $2.05 each direction according to 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.

jaredsohn2• 12 years ago

Agreed. 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• 12 years 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".

fakename4• 12 years ago

Hack the newspaper business by paying for one newspaper and then taking them all!

krallja3• 12 years ago

Hack the movie theater by buying one ticket but going into two movies!

fakename4• 12 years ago

Hack your insurance policy by lying about your smoking!

at-fates-hands5• 12 years ago

I believe the hack is buying one ticket and then going to the back door and letting in 10 of your friends.

fakename4• 12 years ago

Hack grocery store self-checkouts by ringing up lobster as potatoes!

GuiA• 12 years ago

When 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• 12 years ago

    I wish Fast Company had written an article about me 
    at the time :(

Not enough Big Data.

pavel_lishin2• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Charlie is not a real person, it's a song.

silencio• 12 years ago

The 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.

krallja3• 12 years ago

The 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.

jaredsohn2• 12 years ago

I 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.

Aloisius3• 12 years ago

The 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• 12 years ago

This is quite possibly the most silicon valley headline I've ever seen.

fakename4• 12 years ago

Twitter data scientist uses ONE WEIRD TRICK to rip off public good.

slig• 12 years ago

Looks like it was generated using this: http://grantslatton.com/hngen/?lookback=2

at-fates-hands5• 12 years 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.

peterwwillis3• 12 years ago

If 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-highe...

[1] http://sfist.com/2013/09/18/map_youd_need_to_work_5_minimum_...

at-fates-hands5• 12 years ago

Waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy 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• 12 years ago

Looks 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

oh_sigh2• 12 years 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.

Of course, a judge would probably laugh at you and find you guilty in 15 seconds with a "logical" argument like that.

dragonwriter• 12 years 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.

placeybordeaux2• 12 years ago

Person A is evading paying one fare and paying a seperate one which they were never asked to pay.

Fomite• 12 years ago

Why do I think the time spent on this will never, ever be made up by BART savings, theoretical or otherwise.

shaunrussell• 12 years ago

can we all agree to stop using the term "hack" like this?

jimktrains2• 12 years ago

Why? This was a novel way of doing something, a hack.

kyleblarson• 12 years ago

Why not just jump the turnstile? There really is no difference between this and his "hack".

marquis• 12 years ago

I don't know about SF but many cities have patrollers. Getting caught without a ticket is an instant fine.

klochner• 12 years ago

His point was that they're morally equivalent, and that you shouldn't do either.

azinman2• 12 years ago

Swapping 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• 12 years ago

1. 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• 12 years ago

The 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.

bri3d• 12 years ago

Why 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• 12 years ago

  This, 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• 12 years ago

In 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• 12 years 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/

650REDHAIR• 12 years ago

Little 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.

placeybordeaux2• 12 years ago

Wow 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.

A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

Related Stories