BART uses a distance-based fare chart and the automated faregates at entry and exit and deduct the fare from a pre-paid ticket. If someone jumps the gate, it’s pretty much impossible to prove whether they did or did not pay without running their ticket through a reader at the station agent’s booth to see where they entered the system. In practical terms, unless BART police witness someone jumping the gate or piggy-backing through the gate with someone else, they don’t bother with fare enforcement.
MUNI uses what they call “POP” or proof of payment. The light rail station platforms cars are a POP zone, for example. They started doing this because it used to be impossible to legally board the second or third car of a train at a street-level stop as they often did not have operators staffed in all cars, resulting in the lead car being absolutely jammed and the other cars nearly empty.
Now, you can board at any door as long as you have a valid monthly pass or transfer. Enforcement is pretty random and uncommon, at least in my experience.
If I understand your question correctly, the answer is yes. This only applies to commuter rail because the subway/light rail/bus pass fees are a flat rate. But Metrolink charges you based on how far you’re going.
If you bought a ticket from Station #1 to Station #5, but you were really going to Station #10 and your ticket was checked past Station #5, you could definitely be ticketed. The conductor is probably going to give you some leeway depending on what story you tell, of course. But there is no such thing as buying a ticket on the train. I have, on a rare occasion, seen a conductor force someone to get off at the next stop and buy a ticket, but since station stops are generally only 40 seconds at the most, that holds up the train, so it’s not an ideal solution.
I’m not sure why you feel this is so backwards, though. What legitimate reason would you have for buying a ticket for less than the distance you’re planning to travel?
San Diego’s Trolley uses the honor system. Access to stations is unrestricted. You walk up to a kiosk, select the appropriate fare for your trip, put your money in, get your ticket back. When special events are happening at venues the Trolley services, a person is typically on hand at each station to sell tickets for those events.
My experience riding the Trolley is at least 95% during daylight hours. During those times normally the only Trolley-related person on each train is the driver, so obviously checking tickets does not occur.
But once the sun starts to set, security guards employed by the Trolley’s operator start boarding and riding the trains. I don’t recall personally seeing any such instances in the very few times I’ve been on the Trolley after sunset, but I have a very vague recollection of seeing/hearing somewhere that the security guards will check tickets during those hours.
They used the honor system in Vienna’s subway when I was there. I read no German, and had no clue what was happening, so I just followed the crowds.
At one point they were all throwing tickets into waste cans in the center of the aisles. I had no ticket - the ticket machines were far behind me, so I kept going, there was never a turnstile, so I got on the train and had a free ride.
I asked my friend how it was supposed to work and did it right on the return trip.
In the absence of electronic fair calculating machines which
a) are expensive to install
b) can slow the flow of passengers into and out of busy stations (not as much as having people in charge of checking tickets in and out, but more than barrier free access)
an honour/fine system is a way to reduce manpower. You have just a few people doing random checks throughout the day and rely on the fear of being caught to keep people honest. If the fines were small, people would just not buy tickets at all, since it would be cheaper to pay the fines every few days/weeks/months than pay the fares in the first place.
They’re mostly used, though, for systems with no zones or just a few zones. I find them fairly rare on systems where the fare differs for every possible combination of two stations.
Actually I heard that the song was from the time they raised the fares. But when I lived in Boston, 35 years ago, the Green line took money (before tickets) on exit because it ran on tracks out to the far suburbs. The red, orange and blue lines did it normally. I vaguely remember it was from needing extra fare for long trips, but I didn’t ride it out there that often.
Since it is based on zones, I can see that if you got two tickets for different entry points, using the one closer to your exit would be cheaper. However I don’t see how you would get out without marking the closer one as an exit.
As for Boston, the Red line didn’t go nearly as far as it does today when I lived there. Cue the Tom Lehrer Boston Subway song, which is unrecorded as far as I know but which appears in the second volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiography.
The NYC area has a little bit of everything. Some were already mentioned, but I’ll lay it all out at once:
Subways: $2.00 to enter ($1.50 on PATH, a competing subway that goes to New Jersey). You swipe a card to enter, and once in, you can ride as much as you want until you exit a station (nothing required to exit aside from going through the turnstile in the opposite direction). I once spent 30 hours in the NYC subway.
NY busses: same fare system as subway, but leaving the bus is like leaving a station, except there’s no turnstile. You are allowed a free transfer to a subway station or a second bus. the card will remember.
Staten island rapid transit: same system as subway, except only the staten island ferry station has turnstiles, but they require fare collection for both entering and exiting. riding SIRT is free unless you’re going/coming from the ferry station
Metro-North, Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit rail: you must buy a paper ticket before boarding. Conductors will walk through the train a couple of times and collect tickets. If your destination will be after the next walkthrough, he will attach a marker paper to your seat to remember.
NJT’s Secaucus station is the exception. The two branches of NJT meet here, and you must use your ticket in turnstiles to either change platforms or exit/enter the station. This is because Secaucus is close enough to the terminal that conductors often can’t complete their walkthrough, and NJT doesn’t want anyone trying to steal a free ride out of/into NYC.
The whole Los Angeles metro area is gigantic, many people come and go (my 80 mile/one way commute is not common but certainly not unheard of) and the train is heavily subsidized in a state experiencing budget problems. Hell yeah they fine you for abusing it! The choice for most people in my area is either to ride the train/bus or take a car. Many employers and some schools subsidize train tickets (I think my employer paid half when I was taking it). Others, well, they try to save a few bucks and won’t (or can’t) even pay the half. I remember one guy getting busted and his outburst: “Shit man, I have to get to work!” I’d guess many of the people leaving from my area are commuting to jobs that pay in the range of $10-20/hour.
Anyways, just one part of the whole fucked up greater LA area economy, tied up with jobs, housing, and getting from one to the other in the most economical way possible.
As for the zone system, certain far-flung metro lines in Madrid are outside the central zone. In some cases, line 9 to Arganda for example, even though it’s mapped as one line, the train actually terminates at Puerta de Arganda and you must change trains to the outbound train; there are ticket machines on the platform and you have to validate your ticket before you get on, though there are no turnstiles. At Puerta del Sur, there are turnstiles, but it’s a transfer station (to line 12 Metrosur) anyway.
In central Paris, there are ticket barriers at the entrances to all stations, but on many of the exits there are just one-way barriers that don’t require a ticket to get out. Out on the ends of the suburban RER lines you find stations with no barriers at all where you’re meant to stamp paper tickets in machines on the platform.
That this is the legacy infrastructure presumably explains why they’re behind in their smartcard system: you can only get them as season tickets, rather than pay-as-you-go (as in London). With a lack of ticket checks on exiting, the system can’t keep track of how far you’ve gone. Very annoying if, like me, you’re visiting the city frequently, but in an irregular pattern, forcing me to still use the old-style paper tickets.
The inspections on the RER lines can be quite an event, with a team of a dozen or so inspectors and police suddenly flooding the carriage in concert to stop people slipping away.
With one set of exceptions, virtually all stations have ticket barriers on entrance and exit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ticket inspector on a regular Tube line.
The exception is the Docklands Light Railway, which is the part of the network running out to the east. There are no barriers whatsoever and users are expected to “touch-in-and-out” with their cards on freestanding scanning devices. Since a good part of the traffic is commuters with valid season tickets, virtually nobody does that. Fairly frequent ticket inspections on this one set of lines.
Back in the days of all-paper tickets on the tube, I was in one full ticket-check of an entire train. Clearly the driver was told not to open doors, because they came down through the centre doors of the train, but obviously it wasn’t a typical occurrence and they must have been on the look-out for something or someone more important.
But they do also have the ability to spot-check Oyster cards, to see where they’ve last been used, should they challenge somebody, or if the police arrest somebody on a station. (I wonder if they can do this if they stop-and-search someone?)
Finally, one of the main reasons for building the DLR with a driverless system was that it meant the same staffing levels (i.e. one per train) could provide ticket checking, customer service, a visible presence on platforms, etc. So that’s an additional reason the system can check tickets more frequently.
As I mentioned in my post above, in the Tokyo system, if you’re not sure how much the fare is to your destination, you buy the cheapest ticket and pay the remainder when you arrive. Besides, most people now use open-ended pre-paid cards that are debited automatically at your destination. You’re free to travel wherever you want, or change your mind about where to get off.
Somehow, this city manages to support a private subway system with nearly 8 million riders daily at 282 stations and employs a ticketing system that ensures accurate fare payment, doesn’t slow people down, and doesn’t assume the riders are all criminals.
The train stations out here are all open-air and there is no huddling of exiting passengers into a specific area. You step off the train and into the parking lot. So there really isn’t any method for getting people to pay going out.
The part of your comment that keeps throwing me is the “if you’re not sure how much the fare is to your destination.” The machine tells you the fare depending on where you want to go. Every single destination on the line is in the ticketing machine. You’re asked for your starting destination and your ending destination. There really isn’t any guesswork involved.
Also, the stations are spread out by several miles and are usually in suburban areas. You aren’t likely to randomly decide that you want to choose a different destination because there isn’t necessarily anywhere else to go. The focal point of Metrolink out here is really to get you from home to Downtown Los Angeles and back again.
As Asimovian implied, Metrolink isn’t a subway, it’s a commuter rail system. Many commuter rail systems in North America use the same fare method. As he said, the stations are often little more than a platform and a parking lot – you walk off the train and straight to your car; there’s no place for turnstiles to automatically deduct the correct fare.
An it is still that way in 2008. It seems that all Polish cities that have any public transport use that system. One note: Warsaw subway (or Metro, as it’s called) use turnstiles at entry. Buses and streetcars are honor-only.
My favorite system is one I seen in Stockholm. You can pay bus fare via text message - and just show confirmation message to the bus driver upon entry. I was initially puzzled by all that people whipping out their mobiles and showing them to bus driver. Very XXI-st centurish, I’d say.
That’s a decent description of the stations here once you get out of the center of the city, as the subway lines continue out to become commuter lines. The only difference is that there is a fence around the platform and the passengers exit through a gate that reads their tickets.
There is here, since there are several different networks run by separate private companies, and many places where it’s possible to transfer between networks without passing through a ticket gate. Putting all of the available stations on a single sign would take up more space than is available.