But Muni seems to be on the honor system. My only experience was heading from BART to a football game, using a transfer, but no one checked anything on the jammed train.
Munich - 25 years ago at least, was on the honor system. So is Portland, except some of the line, downtown, is free.
Most of the places that you need to run your ticket through on exit are zone based systems, where your fare depends on the zone.
When I rode the Green line in Boston way back when they sometimes took money on entrance and sometimes on exit, which is why, I supposed, Charlie was stuck on the MTA needing one more nickel.
Did they used to do it different in Boston? I only remember it always requiring either a ticket (in the form of a monthly pass) or a token to get through the turnstile. Now it’s just tickets unless there are some stations that haven’t switched to the new turnstiles yet.
Voyager, I didn’t know that about the Green Line - I’ve not seen them taking tickets on the exit.
Re conductors on the commuter rail not making it around, in my experience it depends how far out you are. If you’re coming from Zone 4 like me then they almost always get to everyone. If you’re going from South Station to a couple of stops farther, usually they don’t.
The other night there was a fire on the commuter rail tracks so we all had to get out and board shuttle buses to go past the fire and on to the next available train stop, where we’d have to get on another train and continue the route. One of the Brain Trust shuttle drivers wanted everyone to show their monthly pass or punched ticket to him to “prove” they had been on the unloaded train and weren’t getting a free ride on the MBTA. People laughed at him. Idiot.
As were Ceske Budejovice and Brno as of 1995; and Warsaw, Lublin, Krakow, and Zamosc as of 2002.
The first time I rode the bus in Ceske Budejovice, I purchased a ticket but couldn’t figure out how to work the time stamp machine. I was caught by the ticket enforcer cleverly disguised as a middle aged housewife. However, through a sequence of odd gestures and accusing myself of being an American, I convinced her and the other passengers that I was too stupid to be allowed in public on my own. Thus I escaped punishment other than a brief demonstration of how to push the lever down.
In Krakow in 2002, a fellow student in my EFL teacher training course was caught without a ticket on the streetcar. They made her ride to a central station for a discussion but let her off with a stern talking to. I wonder whether she showed them her Canadian or her German passport?
The light rail system in Santa Clara County California (Silicon Valley) works on the honor system with spot checks, too.
For the subway, you tap a smart card when you enter and when you exit, and the fare is automatically calculated and deducted. If you don’t have a “regular” smart card, you can get a “one trip” kind which only have enough stored value for the trip you want to make.
I’ve never in my life seen anyone jump a turnstile or otherwise try to cheat the system, although I gather students tend to hold on to their student issued smart card to get concessionary rates for as long as they can.
Same for buses, tap in and out. The fare is calculated according to the number of stops you’ve taken, and rebates if you have to transfer to the bus or the train.
If you don’t have a “regular” smart card, you can pay in cash to the driver, who will issue you a ticket. You basically ask the driver how much you have to pay, and he’ll tell you, or if you already know your fare (or you simply cheat and pay the minimum) you simply drop your money into the tray (more of a “glass box”) and the driver will issue you a paper ticket.
Conductors occasionally come on the bus with a hand held gadget to check if you’ve tapped your smart card, or if you’re beyond what you paid for on your paper ticket.
Before the smart card was implemented, people used to cheat on the paper tickets all the time, paying minimum fare, either because they wanted to save a buck, or because they simply didn’t know the right fare or couldn’t be bothered to find out. Now, cheating is a lot less common (mostly because the driver will yell at you if he thinks you didn’t “tap in”), but I’ve seen it happen once or twice.
In Tokyo, and indeed in most of Japan, you initially buy a ticket and put it through the turnstile. The ticket is then returned to you. You have to hold on to it until you get to your destination, where you put it through the turnstile again… If you don’t have the right destination/amount match, it won’t let you through. The handy thing is that you can easily adjust your ticket amount as soon as you arrive at your destination. So even when I’m going all the way to Tokyo, at a cost of around 2500 yen, I just buy a 180 yen ticket (because I’m lazy) and adjust it once I get there. Unless you’re in a hurry, there’s no real reason to buy a ticket of the exact fare.
According to one of my friends, a conductor once checked his ticket. I have never seen that happen, and as far as I know you are allowed to just buy the cheapest ticket and adjust it, it’s not like it’s illegal or something. I don’t know that there would be any point to checking the ticket.
There are ways to cheat the system, of course. Good old fashioned hopping the turnstile, or “accidentally” losing your ticket and lying about where you come from (Japan is not at all strict about losing tickets–especially if you’re a foreigner and your Japanese is not up to scratch.) If you live in the distant countryside, there are sometimes unmanned train stations which have no turnstiles at all. I honestly do not recommend these, because the Japanese train system is like a gift from god, and cheating the system totally makes you a bad person!
Taipei’s metro system is similar except they use a weird token with some special bit inside so you just have to swipe it over the detector on the turnstile. That was fun. It was less efficient than Japan’s system, though, because you couldn’t adjust fares by machines. The regular trains there seemed to still be based on dudes checking your ticket by hand and it seemed really strict about losing your ticket too. No threatening signs in Japan, that’s for sure. They did check your ticket on the inter-city trains.
BART in the Bay Area is the same. Someone told me that there was a way to use two different tickets that would save you money, but I don’t remember exactly how it worked.
I often take the subway in Los Angeles, and once I was in a hurry, and forgot to get a ticket. It wasn’t until I got off that I realized that I could have been fined.
Baltimore, MD, light rail: Similar to LA. You buy tickets from an automated booth. They’re good for a certain length of time. Inspectors get on the car every once in awhile and check tickets; it’s a $50 fine if you don’t have one.
I don’t have a real preference. The DC system of having to scan the ticket as you leave (so that you pay a higher fare the longer you go) can be a bit of a pain in the ass, especially when there are a lot of out-of-town protesters. I prefer paying one fare for the entire system, like in NYC.
Most railroads sell tickets at the station, but you can usually get aboard a buy one from the conductor (though it’s more expensive that way).
In NYC you need a metrocard to get into the turnstiles but not to get out. There are generally MTA employees in a booth watching the turnstiles to prevent people from jumping them to ride for free or cops waiting far enough into the terminal that they aren’t noticable but close enough to see if someone tries to jump the turnstile for a free ride. On the metro-north (which is the train system that takes you out of NYC up into other parts of the state) you buy a pass and the conductor comes through the train after every stop and checks tickets.
When the new system started a year ago, I was told that checkers would be aboard, and the fine for not paying was $75. I have never seen a checker.
If you get on the trolley when it is empty or if you get on through the driver’s door, you have to pay. If you get on through a side door when the train is crowded, no one is going to care. In fact, if you do that, it’s impossible to pay. Half of the stops don’t even have a kiosk to get a Charlie ticket.
When there were tokens, you did have to put one in in order to exit at the Braintree stops on the Red Line. I don’t know how it works now with the Charlie Tickets.
TDN, what do they think people are supposed to do on the commuter rail if the conductor doesn’t show up? Go and find one and offer to pay? I’ve never seen a checker, either. If one ever approached me I’d probably think he was some kind of scammer and refuse to show him anything.
I think they let it slide. Sometimes when it gets really crowded they don’t even bother to check. And I certainly don’t go looking for a conductor.
Remember when there was a fire at Downtown Crossing a few months ago? A lot of people who needed to get on the Red Line couldn’t, and so had to take the commuter rail to Braintree. The train was impossibly crowded. Ticket collection was impossible.
Let me get this straight: If you get on at station #1 with a ticket to go as far as station #5, if you’re asked to show a ticket beyond that point you get fined $200?
How… primitive. It’s as though they don’t actually want people riding the train.
Boston’s already been covered, so I’ll go with my most recent city, Tokyo (which has a system essentially the same as the rest of Japan).
Fares never get checked on the subways just because it would take forever. On the intercity trains a conductor will come through at times, but they only check tickets if you’re in a reserved seat section. Otherwise, they’re there to sell tickets. If you’re caught obviously trying to cheat the fare (and short of jumping the turnstile, it’s not easy to catch, but the automated readers are getting smarter), the fine is triple the fare for your ride. If you lose your ticket, you’ll have to pay the full fare when you arrive at the destination, which could effectively be a 100% fine.
2.a There’s no penalty for having a ticket that doesn’t reach your destination. Every station has an automated machine that will read your ticket and charge you the difference. In fact, the majority of riders now use open-ended pre-paid cards that automatically debit the right amount when you pass though the exit gate, rather than buying a ticket for every ride (making ticket-checking a moot point). Every guide notice tells people that if you don’t know the fare to your destination, buy the cheapest ticket and just pay the remainder when you arrive (or on the intercity trains, show your ticket to the conductor on the train and pay the remainder to him, for which you will get a receipt to show at your destination). At worst, if you’ve traveled halfway across the country and changed lines seven times on the same $2 ticket (which I’ve done), you show your ticket to the guy in the booth at the station, and he’ll dutifully drag out his huge fare book and figure out what you owe. At no point are you ever treated like a criminal or penalized; this is simply what you’re supposed to do.
I cannot begin to fully describe just how utterly bass-ackwards the system you describe above sounds to me. What on earth is their basis for doing it that way?
Dallas. DART light rail trains are on the honor system as well with fairly frequent fair inspections. In general, they don’t tend to inspect right after major events at the American Airlines Center when large numbers of people are all leaving at once.
Trinity Rail Express is also on the honor system, but you can count on a fare inspector about 95% of the time.
Here in Montreal, we use the barrier system: you must pass through a turnstile to get to the trains, and after that there are no checks – you can leave freely through the turnstiles.
However, they’re implementing a smart card pass system this year, and apparently they will start doing spot checks.
On the commuter trains, though, they do honour payment with spot checks. I can only recall one time I’ve ever been checked (of course, I rarely take the commuter train anyway).
I just realized I may have misunderstood question 2.
Fares in Japan are almost never checked on the train. They are almost always (99.9%) checked as you leave your destination, however. I think the only thing that impresses me more than how quickly the automatic readers scan and evaluate tickets from over a hundred different stations with dozens of different prices, is how quickly the human ticket takers can do the same thing. I’ve heard that anyone hoping to get promoted to management in Tokyo Metro has to successfully complete a six-month stint as a ticket taker at one of the busier stations.
Oh yeah. One time when I was in Barcelona, a friend and I were returning from Sitges by commuter train (at first light, since we’d been partying until all hours.) I bought a ticket from the machine. The conductor came through and asked for our tickets. I gave him mine. My friend shrugged, and claimed the machine had broken down after me. The conductor shrugged, and sold him an on-train ticket (butlletí de percepció en ruta) for the regular fare, checking off “station without ticket service.” I guess their approach is “no harm, no foul,” although it does kind of encourage people not to buy tickets; or else he didn’t want to get into it.
A lot of places on the honour system have basically decided that it would cost more to have live ticket takers than there would be generated in fare-box revenue, an approach I can understand. Actually, a few places have made their entire system free on the same rationale, which is remarkable. Conversely, in Montreal the reason they’re moving to smart cards is to boost compliance, somewhat the opposite reason, but we’re so poorly subsidized we rely on fare-box for upwards of 50% of operating costs, despite having just about the highest proportional ridership in North America.
I used to take the LA Metrolink from Chatsworth to downtown and I guess they checked about once a week.
it was funny though. They checked one day, ok. Then they checked again the next day, which is pretty rare. I remember one guy half-complaining that “You just checked yesterday”. He hadn’t bought a ticket thinking that they wouldn’t check two days in a row.
BART has turnstiles at every station and requires a ticket to enter or exit (rates are based on distance).
MUNI Metro underground operates the same way. MUNI buses and Metro on the surface are split between needing to pay as you board and getting a transfer/receipt, and POP (Proof-of-Payment, which is basically the honor system.
People laughed at him. Idiot.