
A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares - _pius
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3026711/a-twitter-data-scientist-hacks-san-franciscos-subway-fares
======
GuiA
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)

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

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yeah, I should have made that clearer in my comment. I still think it's a bit
morbid.

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

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kens
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](http://www.sacrt.com/penalcode.stm)

~~~
oh_sigh
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
> 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.

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

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

~~~
fakename
Hack your insurance policy by lying about your smoking!

~~~
krallja
Hack the power company by plugging your iPad into the electrical outlets on
your neighbor's porch!

~~~
jetru
Hack your calculator. Type in 58008. Turn upside down. WHAT?!

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

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

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

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

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

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nchuhoai
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

~~~
jaredsohn
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
>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".

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ColinWright
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
"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/)

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krallja
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.

~~~
jaredsohn
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.

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michaelt

      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.

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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.

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650REDHAIR
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.

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at-fates-hands
"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
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...](http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2013-04/sfs-minimum-wage-highest-in-
the-nation-eludes-thousands-as-enforcement-effo)

[1]
[http://sfist.com/2013/09/18/map_youd_need_to_work_5_minimum_...](http://sfist.com/2013/09/18/map_youd_need_to_work_5_minimum_wag.php)

~~~
at-fates-hands
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."

~~~
peterwwillis
Sorry, I miscalculated. I counted whole weeks instead of work days, which is
250 days, so really it should be $520 for $2 a day for 260 days with 2 (full)
weeks vacation.

Your logic is strange, though. You mention that considering the high cost of
living, $14 won't go very far. The insinuation, I guess, is that because it
doesn't go very far, it isn't worth much? When really the fact is that since
goods and services in SF have much higher value, each dollar you save is that
much more important to being able to afford even the basic necessities (like
rent, much less food and transportation!)

"What you consider" to be a minimal amount of money is what some people
consider %3 of their annual income. For you that's probably what, $3,000? You
can probably afford to lose that and it doesn't really affect your life much,
which is why you have such a skewed view on what is minimal or worthwhile and
what isn't. For a lot of people, $56 a month is the difference between having
to borrow money from family to pay the rent or not, or having to decide
between feeding everyone in their family for the week or not.

Hybrid car? Okay, I get it, either this is a troll or you seriously just don't
consider anyone other than yourself to matter, and thus this idea of saving
money is nonimportant to you. But it could be life-saving to other people.
Like someone once told me, "Hey fool, this ain't no football game!"

~~~
at-fates-hands
>>>> The insinuation, I guess, is that because it doesn't go very far, it
isn't worth much?

Not at all. The point is in a high rent area, everything is more expensive.
Simply put, $14 won't go very far. It doesn't mean that $14 is worthless.

>>>> You can probably afford to lose that and it doesn't really affect your
life much, which is why you have such a skewed view on what is minimal or
worthwhile and what isn't.

Whoa! Pump yo brakes there playah. First of all, you don't know me from a hole
in the wall. You shouldn't start swinging wildly like that when you don't even
know where I came from or where I've been. I have a crystal clear view on
what's worthwhile, but at the same time, it's relative to your own life. I've
been in a gutter, I know what its like to live on food stamps and have to
bootstrap yourself to get somewhere in life. Nobody needs to tell me I don't
know the value of money. I've been there, and I know.

>>>> Hybrid car? Okay, I get it, either this is a troll or you seriously just
don't consider anyone other than yourself to matter, and thus this idea of
saving money is nonimportant to you.

Quite the opposite actually. My whole point in the first place is there are
better, less arduous ways of saving $56 a month than trying to find someone to
trade a train ticket with every day for a full year. Hell, you could probably
skip the $6 Starbucks every day for a few weeks and save that. You could bike
to work two days out of five and save it in gas. You could start a side
business and MAKE an additional $56 per month. That was my point to begin
with. I'd rather be doing something that's enjoyable to save or earn that
money instead of hounding some stranger to swap tickets with me so I can save
some money.

Does that make sense??

~~~
peterwwillis
> Hell, you could probably skip the $6 Starbucks every day for a few weeks and
> save that. You could bike to work two days out of five and save it in gas.
> You could start a side business and MAKE an additional $56 per month.

Aside from biking to work (which is sometimes feasible but sometimes not, such
as with people with disabilities, the elderly, people who live far away,
people who don't own a bike, people who don't have a shower at work, people
who work long hours at manual-labor jobs and are constantly tired, and you
know, all the other ways this might not work) I don't think those are options
that most minimum-wage workers have. Buying Starbucks every morning is not
something minimum-wage workers typically do. Being able to start a business is
a privilege usually of the middle class, or businesses passed down through
families, or require certain education or other resources, not to mention the
barriers of being either non-white, non-male or not a native english
speaker... Not to say it can't be done. But _most_ minimum wage workers can't
do these things.

There's a lot of people who don't have a better way to save money because
they're already saving everything they can. This technique provides a new way
to save.

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bri3d
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.

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usaar333
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.

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

~~~
jimktrains2
Why? This was a novel way of doing something, a hack.

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placeybordeaux
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.

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deckar01
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.

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

