Clever, but I hear it's pretty easy to just hop over the BART railings.
And if you look respectable you can get away with it. Life hack!
And when the BART starts breaking down and looking shitty, we'll know to blame you guys for not paying for it.
Fare Hacking on BART
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#22In the original manual formulation, I don't understand how the paths of these two travelers cross in Oakland. It looks like they'd only be able to take their quite short section. Unless they both stayed on their trains past the points where they where supposed to exit, but I don't see how you can do that if they scan your ticket when exiting the train.
> I don't see how you can do that if they scan your ticket when exiting the train.
On the BART system you scan your tickets while entering/exiting the station, not the train
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if you look respectable you can get away with it. Life hack!
And when the BART starts breaking down and looking shitty, we'll know to blame you guys for not paying for it.
It's already pretty shitty. Have you tried traveling from downtown SF through the Mission stops? The tunnel is incredibly loud with screeching/scraping noises, and it's been that way a long time, apparently a product of how the rail is designed.
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#24RFID isn't spoofable? I thought it was.
Mifare cards are generally spofable is as long as you know the keys. Which you can extract out of the air with a computer and some equipment.
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#25RFID isn't spoofable? I thought it was.
> The card operates on the 13.56 MHz range putting it into the Near Field Communication category (rather than RFID, as is commonly misconceived). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_card#Technology
The important distinction isn't really the frequency. It's that the card has an actual circuit that performs some crypto handshake with the reader. It's not just static information encoded that anyone can just read and duplicate.
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#26When you are some kid in their parents basement and figure out ways to scam money from public transit you are rebelling as a natural part of childhood. When you are a well skilled and very well payed employee of a high profile tech company you are essentially having fun at the expense of the public servants who work(for a lot less money) to provide essential services to the public. Maybe those reading this can take t…
The technical component of the post is really interesting and indeed it's a more general problem, but I had a similar reaction to the framing: spending time figuring out how to reduce revenue on public transportation isn't the right problem. That same time 'hacking' could have been spent thinking how to genuinely improve a public service.
It is a fun "what if" problem you might think about if you spend a lot of time on public transit and realize that the system is less than ideal. Of course, no systems are fraud proof, as doing so would usually require more resources than could be justified.
Thinking about the system at all is also a nice way of getting started with thinking about how to solve its real problems. Creative juice priming. This is why persecution of thought crimes isn't the right approach either.
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#27When you are some kid in their parents basement and figure out ways to scam money from public transit you are rebelling as a natural part of childhood. When you are a well skilled and very well payed employee of a high profile tech company you are essentially having fun at the expense of the public servants who work(for a lot less money) to provide essential services to the public. Maybe those reading this can take t…
How many corporates have you seen not do something like this in some capacity but at a larger scale?
Something or the other was exploited (like natural resources, human resources) as money certainly didn't print itself.
Public transport is built at a great cost to income tax payer's money and subsequent subsidy to ensure the tax payers could afford it and prefer it. Usually, the only ones making money are the builders and manufacturers who were contracted to construct it, and other corporates and vested interests that are probably the 1%
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#28When you are some kid in their parents basement and figure out ways to scam money from public transit you are rebelling as a natural part of childhood. When you are a well skilled and very well payed employee of a high profile tech company you are essentially having fun at the expense of the public servants who work(for a lot less money) to provide essential services to the public. Maybe those reading this can take t…
> you are essentially having fun at the expense of the public servants The author never actually went out and fraudulently saved money by implementing his idea, so I fail to see how his actions are "at the expense of the public servants". To quote him, > One final note before I dive in: this algorithm is essentially large scale ticket swapping, which is obviously illegal and unethical. I don’t believe that it would b…
> The author never actually went out and fraudulently saved money by implementing his idea
nope, it's just a big mental wank designed to show the world that the author is medium clever and knows how to write down an ILP problem, make pretty graphs, and something about NFC.
I'm not sure which I find less appealing, really.
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#29This will probably attract downvotes, but I'd call it an algorithm for collective, mass fraud.
One might find it surprising, but I've seen people do this several years back. The only difference being that it was on a much smaller scale, with only a handful of friends involved.
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#30Was trying to think of a real world problem that this could solve. Basically you want multiple entities to peform tasks for each other (tagging) at multiple destinations at a minimal cost.
One possibility is the taxi/uber/lyft hailing problem. Instead of stations, you have rider and car locations. Time and distance is the ticket cost.