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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

In 2023, any transit system that requires more than quickly tapping your phone, wallet, watch, etc to the the turnstile is decades behind the world technologically and the inconvenience of looking for change is a problem because of the city council or state not investing in public transit. The vast majority of mass transit riders are not tourists from the suburbs using the system as a novelty that would be confused anyway.

I am personally not a fan of NFC becoming the standard in the US, since it requires strategically placing credit cards in your wallet instead of using a card specifically made for transit fare, but it does make it so large swathes of the population never even have to think about going to a fare machine.

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A system that relies on turnstiles is decades behind as well. Best practices in much of Europe use proof of payment and cheap monthly passes relative to single tickets, so most users have monthly passes.

This cuts down on access time, infrastructure cost, fare collection cost, and minimizes marginal cost per trip for users (i.e. zero).

In Germany, they just introduced a monthly 49€ ticket that covers transit (and regional trains) for the whole country.

I usually compare how far behind the US is to Japan. How does a system without turnstiles work in Europe? In Japan, the shinkansen can still actually be used with their cards and tapping pass the turnstile, but nearly everyone besides business passengers buys a ticket for the one off far trips. I can't even imagine short trip subways not having a turnstile.

Even in the US, monthly swipe passes have been a thing in even the systems that used tokens.

You tap your card in the bus, when you pass by the tapping devices.

But monthly passes, for example in NYC, are expensive relative to single tickets, so adoption is relatively low.

If everyone has a monthly pass, fare evasion is less of an issue even in an open system. Fares are checked on a sampling basis with fines for not having a ticket.

Fines only hurt working people. The homeless just ignore them.

Could you justify the term "best practises"?

Last time I took an U-Bahn in Berlin, a guy was urinating in front of me. I have not seen such sociopathic behaviour in public transport in Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing. All are turnstile based. I feel that they are strictly better in almost all dimensions than e.g. Berlin's public transport. In all you pay with some variant of NFC tech, e.g. your phone. Zero effort.

Fine-grained access control also allows for better understanding of train usage, and capacity planning.

Cost of transport is orthogonal to access.

Asian cities are very different from the West, so not sure lessons apply. Although Berlin is probably more affordable in PPP terms, and relative to population has more rapid transit than those asian cities (500km for 4.6Mio ppl).

In virtually all dimensions, Berlin transit is better than every US system, Except NYC. Which is ironically the only place Ive ever seen anybody pee in the subway, and that one is supposedly “protected” by turnstiles.

The US has a homelessness epidemic, Berlin has some problems in this area as well. This is a problem thats orthogonal to the transit system, and has to be solved by society at large. Turnstiles don’t solve homelessness.

I did not bring up US public transport as an example of "best practises". I agree that Berlin has a extensive and well-developed public transport, and that is commendable.

> Turnstiles don’t solve homelessness.

Nobody claims they do. My anecdote illustrated the opposite direction: barriers remove one related cluster of reasons, related to personal safety, why some avoid public transport and prefer to drive by car, namely the fear to be accosted by vagrants, pickpockets, and other forms of sociopathy.

But they don’t solve that as well, cf. NYC subway.

Do you think this has something to do with the fact that turnstile jumping has been effectively legalised (in the sense of not being prosecuted) in NY?

Question for you: can you quantify, what fraction of crime and other forms of sociopathy in the NY public transport system you estimate to be committed by passengers who paid their fare? (My estimation: less than 1 percent.)

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that a simple metal gate alone can completely solve complex social dysfunction, a simple metal gate can however help, and, when we refer to turnstile access being desirable, we implicitly assume that we can reasonably expect turnstile use being adhered to, and violations punished with at least moderately high probability.

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