Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 per…
Re: Fare Hacking on BART
#51Personally this is my least favorite artifact from hacker culture. Not necessarily thinking about these things, but the embellishing of it. There used to be a time where information was scares so it was hard to learn thing, today that isn't the case so one should pivot form reverse engineering the system to improving it fairly quickly. Instead people spend a lot of time formalizing how "smart" their hack was. The greater damage is of course that when a lot of people is ready to point out and celebrate inconsistencies it's hard to foster a culture of proposing improvements.