07-31-2017, 11:20 AM
(07-31-2017, 10:43 AM)Canard Wrote: For your fare, you get one entry to the system. One use. One ride. Period. Anything beyond that is abuse of the system and is stealing, in my mind.
...UNLESS they say your fare is good for "90 minutes of system use", then sure, I could agree with you.
I got my wrist slapped in Kobe for riding the Portliner in a circle. The faregate wouldn't let me exit when I tried to tap my Suica out at the same station I entered at for my ~40 minute ride. I had to go to the counter and she got all apologetic (Japan!), and then charged me an additional fare (ie, round trip). I smiled.
In some systems, this is indeed how it is spelled out. Here, it is not. Like a carshare/bikeshare or large pre-planned route multi-high-capacity-vehicle system share (e.g. GRT), we have spelled out a valid time for a fare to be valid. I have definitely had short trips where I'll use just one ticket (e.g. going to run a quick pickup, or a quick workout at a gym) and stay within every letter of system policy.
Your Japanese example sounds more akin to how GO operates, where it is fare by distance. It would be against the rules, say, to have a delivery business where riders picked up and dropped off at GO stations, but only ever tapped on and off at two adjacent stations, once per day, while riding the system to its fullest extents.
We could move towards a system where we considered boardings a per-use cost (punishing those who don't live on direct routes based on their transportation needs), on a distance cost (punishing those who live farther from their destinations), on a time cost (punishing those who aren't able to use express buses and have to take milk run routes), on a space constraint use (punishing those who weight more, who do use the bus to grocery shop and put a bag of groceries under their seat, or who go to school on the bus and put a backpack on their lap, or the mother whose child is too big to ride her lap rather than the mother whose child is small enough to share one seat). Inevitably, the system will create weird incentives based on its fare system. Similar, in a way, to how some have put forth the idea on this forum that gas taxes fund road use, even as we build the road system to accommodate peak commuting patterns but expect to see very different gas tax revenues from the parent only able to afford a less-fuel-efficient van for their family, compared to the individual able to afford a hybrid or even electric car, like a wealthy friend of mine in their no-gas-tax-paying Tesla.
In the end, I think most societies discover that a system with less friction (in this case, rules being friction) is the more effective system, and so we get very simple rules, even seeing some systems avoid heavy policing of fare evasion due to benefits often being negative.
To get back to an earlier point about whether people will jam the ticket machine at the last moment as ION arrives, to avoid wasting transfer time waiting on a platform, you could have ION ticket dispensers dispense transfer times at 90 minutes AFTER the next scheduled ION train arrival, so that we don't have a mad dash as the train pulls in. You could even have the transfer barcode indicate where the transfer originated, so that you couldn't print a transfer at an ION station right after a train departs during a 30-minute headway time, only to hop onto a bus with ~120 minutes of transfer time. Or, for the direction vs time transfer rules people, you could have a transfer invalidate if an individual tried to use it twice on the same route, or twice in opposite directions on the same route. But once you start making the system this complicated, its use will go down.