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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

This was decades ago, the ticket machines were not real-time connected to anything. It's entirely possible the numbers accounting used for ticket sales was the amount of cash retrieved from the machines, and there was no separate system keeping track of the tickets printed.

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Wouldn't they be able to measure the rolls of ticket paper?

And mechancial counters were a thing in 1981 as well. I mean the machines had a way to say "you need to pay X amount" or a way to count money, surely that can be fed into a daily / weekly counter, a printed record, etc.

And also, they were pretty precise with the amount that he stole: they can't bring a guess to court, they had an exact record of how much was stolen.

If they trend it, auditors should still notice it, but different tickets cost different amounts, so there will be variability.

E.g. Kids and seniors get discounts.

They likely counted the number of passengers via turnstiles or a gate or something. Think passenger count would be a good indicator of expected revenue and there would be a pretty clear gap. Probably one of the things the auditors noticed that was explained away by buggy code.

Unfortunately in Edmonton, the LRT is largely on the honour system. There are no fare gates, turnstiles, etc, to derive an accurate count from. Any passenger counts presumably come from statistical sampling or from checking fares as they exit the system (this is an occasional enforcement activity, not an everyday occurrence).

There is a pilot project[0] to put turnstiles/gates at two stations, but this is to keep the homeless out of the stations, not to count passengers.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/transit-turnstiles-o...

Good point. 1981 was a very long time ago in IT terms

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