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A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

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Re: A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

#33

Post by azinman2 »

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.

Re: A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

#34

Post by dragonwriter »

oh_sigh wrote: post #27
kens wrote: post #22

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

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.

> 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.

Re: A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

#35

Post by silencio »

GuiA wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

#38

Post by peterwwillis »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #20

"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.

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_...

Re: A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

#39

Post by klochner »

marquis wrote: post #36
kyleblarson wrote: post #31

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

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

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