Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards 196
New submitter johnslater writes "The Chicago Transit Authority's new 'Ventra' stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million."
$454 million?? (Score:5, Insightful)
For that amount, they could have failed at health care for most of the country. How does one city get that far lost?
Re:$454 million?? (Score:4, Interesting)
People like to rag on China's rampant corruption and how their high speed rail minister got jailed for skimming $ millions.
Well, at least they have a functioning high speed rail. USA is just as corrupt, I guess Chicago politics especially, and unlike the Chinese we're left with nothing valuable at the end of the day.
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The system does work bro. I use it a lot.
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Melbourne is much bigger than Chicago - wait, it's not.... hrm.... there must be some reason Myki was more expensive.
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Brisbane's version of this is called Go Card [wikipedia.org]. Budgeted at a mere AUD 134M it came with the long tail for Cubic who get to operate it for, presumably, a healthy slice (undisclosed) of each ticket. Especially healthy... every year since introduction in 2008 the trip price has risen 15%, more than swallowing the small price drop used to entice people on to the system. They also take 24 hours or more to credit accounts with electronic funds paid in, and operate a completely unaccountable system for penalis
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They also take 24 hours or more to credit accounts with electronic funds paid in
A luxury. Myki typically takes 48 hours when topped up online.
Don't know the cost of failure yet ... (Score:3)
For that amount, they could have failed at health care for most of the country. How does one city get that far lost?
We don't really know what it costs to fail at a national health care IT project yet. They have even started to implement 40% of the functionality.
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It's Chicago, they are so corrupt it makes DC look like the largest source of honest people on the planet. There is a reason why it is a common saying that "in Chicago, the dead vote twice" It is normal that contracts are kickbacks and given projects designed to make companies and people filthy rich while not delivering.
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"Twice" ?!
Actually, the saying is "vote early, vote often". And yes, that applies to dead people too.
(Yes, I am a Chicago resident) (And yes, Ventra could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch)
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While I'm sure there's no small amount of Chicago corruption involved, that cost includes ruggedized public access hardware for card vending and reading. That will significantly increase the costs compared to the development costs of a website. Just be glad they didn't try to implement mall kiosks for healthcare.gov.
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Good point. While my post was written for the chuckles, I didn't consider the hardware aspect of the project.
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They upgraded to the Gold package. It will work as soon as they upgrade to Platinum!
or maybe Centurion.
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What's wrong with Tokens? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?
Re:What's wrong with Tokens? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with Tokens? (Score:5, Insightful)
The old fashion subway token produces little meta-data the NSA can use to track your every move.
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Tracking.
Now they know who you are and where your going.
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If that was used to improve service, it would be more palatable, but I've not heard of anyone caught because of their transit ticket.
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The Metropolitan Police in London quite frequently use Oyster Card data to help them find suspects.
Re:What's wrong with Tokens? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why stop at one mode of tracking when multiple systems allow far more reliable results? Any one tracking mode will deal with a lot of noise, including intentional obfuscation. You can swap around transit cards; wear a hoodie; leave your cellphone at home/work; etc. However, combine multiple systems and you get something far more robust --- match up a person's cell phone, transit card, and facial features, and you've got a far more reliable tool. You can even identify groups of people trying to subvert one s
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You dont know much about this tech. firstly you have to be damn close for facial recognition to work, only very few systems use HD cameras to be able to work at a distance and then they get overwhelmed when there is more than 5 faces on the camera. Please stop mixing up SciFi with the stuff we really have. In reality, it doesnt work that well because the cops would have it deployed everywhere to have a low effort high capture rate on minor criminals. Even something as simple as the License plate cameras
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Facial recognition is plenty fast to track you throughout public transit with trivial difficulty
Citation required. I'd totally buy that they can track a rider on a single trip. But tracking everybody across every trip they make every day of the year. No way.
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Facial recognition is plenty fast to track you throughout public transit with trivial difficulty.
If that were true, then they surely are using facial recognition instead of card readers for these transit services. Oh, they don't? yeah.
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So pretty clearly you've never worked with the technology. It's a long, long way from being ready for prime time. It works under very limited circumstances. Consistent lighting, correct placement in the frame (such as walking through a doorway), and everyone facing at the correct angle. Think that's even vaguely achievable at a bus entrance?
Re:What's wrong with Tokens? (Score:5, Informative)
Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?
Cities move away from tokens to fare cards so they can charge variable rates based on supply and demand. During peak usage, they can make the fee higher and during times of lower ridership, fares can be made cheaper to encourage more ridership. Also general rate hikes cannot be done as quickly with tokens because people can buy a mass of tokens just before the rate hike yet still ride with their pre-hike token after the hike goes into effect.
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In addition to the ability to 'easily' change the charges schedule, these complicated systems allow far more details usage tracking for capacity planning and forecasting. Unlike paper tickets, they can track time of travel and point to point destinations to see which services are being over or under utilised and where additional services may be required.
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A big drawback to the card system is that it eliminates this ploy.
Yeah, 'cause it'd be impossible to allow people with a card linked to an account to pre-buy fares at a lower rate.
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The Boston MBTA system doesn't put fares on the card, but just the dollar amount, so the fairs could be hiked easily.
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The point is that it isn't merely the card that does this, but the system behind it.
Also, storing anything on the card itself beyond an identifier -- my Visa doesn't hold my balance -- seems silly.
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Having cards with only an ID number has disadvantages. Either you require all payment accepters to be continuously online* or you lose the ability to tell people their balance in realtime and refuse people who have run out of credit.
The best compromise is probably to store the balance on both the card and in a central database. Then cross-check those values frequently to check for foul play.
* Which is problematic for a transport system.
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You won't find this in the comments, and its kind of buried in news coverage, but this is the actual reason behind the government ids providing free fares. The system allows you to pay for fares with any credit/debit card that supports nfc. If it the online system takes too long to respond, it just lets them go and gives them a green light. These federal Ids only give free fares when the system takes too long to respond. You could get a free fare on an expired no good credit card, too. Although that is kin
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I don't think you understand the meaning of the word "can".
Re:What's wrong with Tokens? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why couldn't tokens be purchased online? Under the electronic systems, the average rider would still have to 'fumble around' for their ticket anyway. Leaving them visible exposes them to theft.
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> Why couldn't tokens be purchased online
Authentication is one huge problem. In the Seattle area, we have the Orca disaster:
https://www.orcacard.com/
You typically have to call every time you need to login to add more money through the web site. The automated account creation is still broken, and the receptionist at work spends a full day each month refilling our cards(company pays as a benefit). It's a huge hassle. Even more annoying is that there is so much credit card fraud with Orca that certain b
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This appears to be the same AC as above with an unknown grudge against Sound Transit. Essentially nothing that they say is true.
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Bullshit. What is your problem that you have to make shit up?
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How's your productivity when the system is down?
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When I lived in chicago we would do exactly this, I would leave work and notice that a machine was clear and buy $50 in tokens. I was set for at least 2 months. Plus when friends showed up it was easy to give them some to ride with me, etc...
Only people that never actually used the system thinks that people stop and buy them every single day.
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You forget to mention that when you buy ten, you get them in a roll ( like a roll of coins ). You then carry around the roll and peel them when you can.
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I just checked and you can refill at CVS or Jewel. something you could not do with the Chicago Card. At least I always added at a train station.
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As for the tracking, I'm not sure you can put that on these cards. You can always buy throwaway cards if you want stealth, and I'd argue that the fault there lies with your ex-wife and shitty emp
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You can ask the same thing about voting machines. It's like some people are in a race to find more and more ways to fuck up a perfectly simple task.
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You cant give your buddies multi billion dollar contracts with coins. Plus the damn things keep working decade after decade, and we can not allow that.
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Chicago hasn't used tokens for ten years. They use a card system.
Ventra is not a Chicago system. It is a Chicago-area system. Chicago and it's suburbs are serviced by the RTA of which the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority ) is only a part, yes a big part but still a part. There were the transit version of impedance mismatches between subsystem. Ventra was supposed to fuse all that.
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London's system was introduced over 10 years ago.
- It reduced fare evasion, which existed due to limitations of the previous paper ticket system,
- It made working out the fare system optional -- they guaranteed it charged the optimal fare
- It made boarding buses in particular much faster, as it significantly reduced the number of people paying by cash (which was made expensive)
- It gives much better detail on demand for routes, how long journeys take, etc, so it helps transport planning
- It's reduced the nu
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I swear, that has got to be the very theme for the American IT industry over the last 20 years. We spent the late 1980s and early 1990s dreaming up all kinds of crazy tinfoil-hat paranoid scifi bullshit. And then many of us all got jobs implementing that crazy tinfoil-hat paranoid scifi bullshit, because the whole thing that made it believable, good paranoid scifi bullshit, was "hey, this is theoretically actually possible to do."
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I'm sure it was a very expensive project, but I don't know that you'd fine anyone who had a reasonable complaint with the way it turned out.
I certainly hope not! That'd be a major freedom of speech issue, whether or not their complaint was "reasonable".
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I haven't heard complaints about Londons Oyster Card either.
So you'd expect there are existing "more or less of the shelf" solutions for electronic transport tickets.
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The London Oyster Cards took quite a while to settle down. In particular there was a big mess with the above ground trains (partly this was because of reluctance/stubbornness from the train operators). There were days when the whole system failed.
London is a complex mix of trains/tubes/busses/trams etc so often there is more than 1 route between 2 stations. Sometimes the system would charge you the wrong price.
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The kind of thinking that brought you Obamacare.
They tried giving free rides to every disabled person and senior citizen. Remember Blago almost blew up a transit system funding bill by adding it at the last minute.
Turned out they had to abandon it because they were losing money and now free and reduced fare rides are mean tested.
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Problem is in chicago, in fact starting now until april the red line becomes a homeless shelter. they get on and dont get off all night long so they have a warm place to sleep.
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But it gets a LOT worse when it gets cold. one night when it was 0F out it was standing room only and the smell was.... oh dear god....
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Great idea, make it free. Then it would be even more of a rolling homeless shelter / psych ward than it already is!
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It was working fine here in Seattle (and Des Moines, where I know they also provide some free downtown bus service). Since the whole route wasn't free it created some hassle with payment collection, but that's only an issue with the mix-and-match plan not the free part. The program has ended recently as funding for it was withdrawn but statistics suggest it did increase ridership in the free zone.
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Horseshit. You can pay cash on any bus, and I've heard of the Orca system being down once. And what are you babbling about "a paper dollar bill fed to a poorly maintained scanner"? Bills and coins go past the driver, so even if the bill is unreadable the driver can press the button and approve the fare. I take it you don't actually ride Sound Transit.
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In London, we use Oyster cards, and in most of the rest of the UK, we have cards that comply with the ITSO standard. The benefits are that it is much quicker so the bus spends less time at the stop, completes the journey quicker, and can do more journeys per day. Also the driver doesn't have to carry cash, so doesn't have to worry about being attacked by people who want to steal it off him.
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For the buses, you can buy paper tickets from some vending machines by the bus stops, or from local shops. You can also pay by credit or debit card if your card has an NFC chip in it. For rail travel, you can buy cash tickets from the station ticket office or vending machines.
going with the lowest bidder (Score:2)
you get what you pay for.
Chicago Transit Authority (Score:2)
This is what happens when you let a bunch of musicians run things [blogspot.com].
London Oyster (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that everybody is trying to move to this type of things is the success of the London oyster card system. Not perfect, but good enough, and is widely adopted.
The key with the London system was the transit fare system was very well integrated to start with. If you bought a zone 1-4 weekly pass, you could take buses tube and trains everywhere within zone 1-4.
The trick to getting adoption was the cash "penalty" fare. For instance a cash bus fare is nearly twice the price of an oyster card fare. And if you buy a season ticket it gets loaded onto an oyster card. So anybody in London needs an oyster card, and so has one.
The other effective thing that was done was to only have oyster top up and ticket sales at stations and offered exclusively to local independent corner stores. The advantage to the store holder is 2 fold, it gave a small financial return to the store owner, but more importantly for the store owner it got people in the store. Topping up oyster cards and at the same time getting a drink or chocolate bar etc. So very quickly every store had one, and in London there are a lot of them so it was widely accessible with very little staffing costs.
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The Oyster Card really makes a huge difference to the transport experience in London, so much so that you find many many people wondering why it hasn't been rolled out nationally
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Cheap Bus fares? Hardly its £5 for a 3 mile trip were I Live and before you ask there are health reasons I cant walk / cycle / car it.
For comparison, it's £1.35 for a single bus (or tram) journey of any length in London, day or night.
I had read the bus network actually makes a profit, but I can't find the report. The Tube is expected to make a profit next year -- maybe that subsidy isn't as big as you think.
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The funny thing is that everybody seems to want to roll out an oyster card system, but many places want to roll out their own oyster card system, and that leads to cost blowouts because (it seems) many organisations can't manage to do an IT project without falling on their face.
e.g. Auckland Transport [stuff.co.nz] with their AT HOP card [wikipedia.org].
myki in Melbourne, Australia [theage.com.au] which blew out by about $1 billion (on an original ~$0.5 billion cost). To quote from a report discussed in this article [smh.com.au]: ''Keane [who won the contract to ma
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What made it more attractive than traditional paper tickets for my last weekend trip to London was the fact that you don't have to know in advance if you'll need a day pass for that day. Per day fares are capped at the price for a day pass, so you basically don't need to worry about all those fare plans.
And then we have Washington DC that adds a penalty of $1 PER TRIP for the atrocity of using paper tickets instead of buying a $10 plastic card (non refundable). Nothing better to radiate that warm welcome to
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Another advantage:
The gates for Oyster cards work faster than the gates for mechanical cards, because the ticket doesn't need to be fed through a small hole and picked up after it's been read. A gain of 2 or 3 seconds per commuter is a big deal in a crowded city.
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Their is no advantage over a paper ticket with oyster for a weekly pass monthly etc. You still have to buy one at a window, shop etc. The real advantage is in the casual commuter. People making the odd tube or bus trip out of their normal zone or tourists. It massively speeds up boarding of buses with a lot less fumbling around for change.
You can easily share your oyster card with another person. The pay as you go is simply handing it over to them (I have several oysters for the visitors). For weekly passes
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Paper tickets, particularly annual ones, could wear out, which usually meant a long queue. If an Oyster card fails (or is lost) you can transfer the balance / passes to a new card online. (I've done this a couple of times with dropped, unregistered cards I've found, back when I used to change buses in central London at night regularly.)
I've just logged in to the online Oyster system, and I can buy annual season tickets.
Could this be streamlined? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just now hopped over to the CTA website and checked out their budget [transitchicago.com].
In broad terms, they take in about $650 million from fares, $650 million in public funding (from taxes), and an operating budget of $1.3 billion.
Hypothetically speaking, what would the budget be if they eliminated fares? The budget doesn't break out the expenses in a way to examine this (at least - I couldn't find it), but it would eliminate a big chunk of the expenses. Not only are there turnstyles and fare sellers, but collection and counting of the money, maintenance on the styles and ticket machines, and so on. Even the financial cost of maintaining a bank account and driving the money to the bank for deposit could be eliminated.
On the flip side, a person making $15/hr delayed by waiting in line at the turnstyle or purchasing tokens/tickets loses $0.25 worth of time for each minute of delay. A commuter would lose this much twice a day, and the loss would be more valuable if the commuter made more money.
And this change would benefit poor people the most. It's an efficient way to preferentially give them the benefit of a public service.
It seems like a more efficient method might be to eliminate the fares and increase public support to cover the difference. The net gain in customer time plus eliminating the fare network might be more than the increase in taxes. Just eliminating the fare mechanisms alone might reduce expenses enough to cover the loss of revenue.
Has anyone looked into this?
Re:Could this be streamlined? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's interesting is the question on why public transit is viewed so differently than other public functions.
I'm in Canada. Land of public healthcare. We cannot charge people to see a doctor or anything like that.
Ditto for public education.
Yet, even in Canada, transit remains that elusive thing that while it is publicly run and subsidized, it is 'unthinkable' that people shouldn't pay for it.
This is even true of roads, with increasing calls for more tolls to make drivers pay...
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why we treat public infrastructure (like roads and mass transit) so much differently than we do healthcare and education.
Yes, there are various nuances. Things like making sure people don't overuse or congest the system. Of course you could just as easily make that argument for healthcare :P But I think the overwhelming argument is simply that transit is not viewed on the same social level as healthcare or education despite the fact that transit is something we used every single day in and out... and quite frankly relative to the size of government budgets, transit itself is fairly inexpensive.
I laugh with despair when my home province of Ontario spends like 40% of its budget on healthcare, throws billions and billions into education... then people fight and squabble over a hundred million here or there with transit.
It's ridiculous quite frankly.
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I agree it's ridiculous. I suspect it's the residue of so many people being indoctrinated into Capitalist ideals: the very phrase "free rider" encapsulates all the negative connotations drilled into people's heads from birth about the horrors of letting fellow humans benefit without paying. Healthcare and education are obviously too expensive, and too beneficial, for individuals to be charged the full cost up front --- they highlight how ridiculous a pure Capitalist system would be; and, how great benefits
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Shhh! Keep it down, our healthcare is already in shambles and our education system is laughable, don't take the roads away from me too!
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Speak for yourself. The public education system I went through is one of the best in the world.
http://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.aspx?id=4457 [mass.edu]
And as far as health care, well we don't have a problem with that either.
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For the life of me, I cannot fathom why we treat public infrastructure (like roads and mass transit) so much differently than we do healthcare and education.
Road funding is the single largest piece of pork dished out to big motor manufacturers and big oil. Without the roads, people wouldn't buy cars, and wouldn't live 60 miles from where they work. They would have to use, oh I don't know, trains to get around. Heaven forbid!
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What's interesting is the question on why public transit is viewed so differently than other public functions.
You want to know what's really odd? I'm a moderate libertarian/practical minarchist and thus approach it from a substantially different angle, but come to more or less the same conclusion. I approach it from the point that a city is a economic complex. Consider theme parks - most of them have substantial free transport within them, because that makes it more attractive. Same deal with airports, even some malls.
Now that we're considering a city in the context that it's sort of like a mega-mall, we then h
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"All well-informed transit professionals that were contacted for their opinions spoke strongly against the concept of free fares for large systems, suggesting some minimal fare needs to be in place to discourage vagrancy, rowdiness and a degradation of service. "
For a full discussion of both sides of the argument:
http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/as-u.s.-transit-fares-increase-europe-starts-to-make-it-free [nextcity.org]
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That, my friend, sounds like a challenge!
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Charging for parking doesn't do a lot to regulate demand, it's done to regulate turnover. Essentially all publicly-run pay parking is also time-limited, and frequently the rate for short-term usage is lower than commercial parking in the same area. Demand for parking is more or less inelastic because people still need to go places whether or parking is expensive; at best expensive parking encourages the use of other modes of transit.
Turnover isn't actually an issue on public conveyances; loitering *could* b
The Author of TFA on Free Rides is Lazy (Score:3)
[...also, sky blue, water wet.]
I kept waiting for the article that said, "So we went down to a transit terminal armed with as many different RFID and NFC cards as we could find, trying to see which ones worked and which didn't." Then we used our easily purchasable RFID/NFC card reader to see what information the cards we tried had in common with the Federal IDs and the transit cards -- and here's our findings.
Now, I understood *that* sort of journalism would have taken a hundred bucks and a couple of hours, but... ...sheesh, people.
"Misuse of federal credentials?" (Score:2)
"Please be advised that intentional misuse of federal credentials is prohibited"
That's sort of pushing it, isn't it? I don't think the machine is letting them in on basis of the card being a federal credential. It probably lets them in on bases of the one system being confused by a different system's raw data. It could easily be interpreted as fraud but unless the system actually understands on some level that this is a government ID card, it's hardly comparable to pulling a scary-looking badge on a live person or something.
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Tricked by raw data? The reader is looking for something very specific, a number linked to an account from which it can deduct a fare. Is it more likely that a string of numbers not in the the expected format satisfies all the conditions that the machine it looking for by accident or is it more likely that this is purpose built in and Mrs Garypie just stumbled onto someone elses scam? It would be trivial to include code that accepts ranges of values that just happen to match the format of federal IDs (would
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This can't be by accident, "tricked by raw data" isn't even a possibility. This is essentially the same technology that access control systems us. The bit structure is laid out in a particular way, and if any portion of it is incorrect the read is rejected. On a typical 26-bit access control card (don't know what the structure of these ones are) the bits 0-7 are the Facility Code. The firmware on the reader scans them, says "This card belongs in our system" and passes bits 8-25 to the controller, which
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In any case, doing so is stupid, because presumably transactions are logged and ultimately traceable back to the ID holder.
and the metra rail system is still on the hole puc (Score:2)
and the metra rail system is still on the hole punch system
Number clash (Score:2)
IIRC, their RFID card just broadcast a number, and the government cards broadcast valid numbers as well. This suggests that government cards do not allow free ride, but ride on someone else's account.
What I do not get is that TFA says the cards have a smart chip. Why then just use a number, where they can do better?
Ventra doesn't hash their passwords (Score:2)
A Ventra card is basically a Debit card. So one would expect simple best security practices.
Imagine my surprise when I hit the forgot Name and Password button and after entering in my Debit card number and email, I was sent the original password I used (not a reset). As with Adobe, this is asking for a massive breach.
$454 Mil apparently can't buy programmers/designer familiar with password hashing, salt and slow algorithms. Or a basic security audit.
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Its a beta test ... (Score:2)
...doesn't sound very unintentional to me.
Its a beta test for when we all have federally issued ID cards. :-)
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I bet Rahm Emanuel still has a federal ID. Current Mayor, former White House Chief of Staff.
I would be really surprised to see him on the L, even if he could ride for free... unless it was a photo op and this all sounds like they won't be bragging about anything for awhile.