> How do you know how people are using your services if nobody is scanning tickets any more?

The light tram I use often (https://www.vltrio.com.br/) has a sensor above each door which counts how many passengers get in and out of the vehicle at each stop (the payment is done within the vehicle through NFC card readers near each door; the count from the door sensors allows estimating the amount of fare evasion). So these kinds of sensor do exist, and don't need facial recognition to do their job (this particular one wouldn't be able to do facial recognition even if it wanted to, due to its placement looking straight down).

(The presence of these sensors on that particular tram line isn't well known, so it's a bit hard to find more information; a quick web search found https://www.semanadetecnologia.com.br/25semana/wp-content/up... which has on its page 4 some sample images from these sensors, plus photos of the NFC readers).

Operators occasionally run surveys where I live. This is useful anyway because you really want additional information that you'll never be able to get otherwise, like "what's the purpose of your trip?" or "how did you get to the station and how long did it take you?".

In New York, the Staten Island Ferry is free, but you still pass through turnstiles to enter. I assume that that is how they get usage data even though no one needs to buy tickets.

You don't need image recognition to count passengers, there are other sensor types that could detect bodies. Or you could get rid of the facial recognition parts and just focus and record body shapes, explicitly avoiding trying to track or identify individuals.

You missed the distinction between counting passengers on a platform or in a bus, and figuring out what people are using public transport for. “When people get on at this stop, how far do they travel? Are they having to sit on trains for 2 hours or do they only go a few stops? Should we draw a new line here or there?” That’s a different question from “how many trains do we need to dedicate to this line between 8 and 9am on a Thursday?” which can be answered by counting. You can kinda guess with the numbers only, but many paid transport systems have had near perfect info on this their entire service lives. It would be weird to lose it.

> You can kinda guess with the numbers only, but many paid transport systems have had near perfect info on this their entire service lives. It would be weird to lose it.

This level of indiscriminate surveillance is absolutely abnormal from a historical perspective -- it's "weird" they have it in the first place! There's no reason to think that it's necessary. (And since most public transport systems are at least partially government run, and your travel card is associated either implicitly or explicitly with your real identity, travel cards have become an excellent way for the government to surveil every member of the public indiscriminately, allowing for retroactive surveillance -- though of course rubber-stamp courts would give them access to this information from private companies too.)

Most public transport systems have not had access to this information for the vast majority of their existence (and managed to botch expansions just as well as they can today with the benefit of all this data) and have only gained access (along with law enforcement) to it recently.

The issues with increasing public transport coverage is not a lack of data, it's a lack of funding and interest.

> many paid transport systems have had near perfect info on this their entire service lives.

Only if they were entirely built in the last decade and a half. During the hundred years before that, nobody was tracking riders with anything approaching that type of precision, and public transportation was better.

>When people get on at this stop, how far do they travel?

Very few systems that I've ridden on in the US track this kind of information. Most of the time you buy a one way ticket and ride for however many stops you want. There's no tracking for when people get off.

The story says that the goverment will issue free season tickets, not remove ticket scanning.

The funny thing is: in German public transit there is no ticket scanning. You have to stamp single use tickets in rather old stamping machines, so no data collection there other than the count of stamps. Any longer time-ticket isn't scanned or stamped per travel anyway. Not sure whether they use the camera systems these days for this purpose, but in older times they would do statistical counting, e.g. have people (often students) ride certain trains and collect passenger counts.

That isn't universal. There are places which have no stamping machines anymore. Because any ticket, be it bought at a ticket machine, or the driver, already is "stamped". There may be some leftover installs in older vehicles, on lend from somewhere, or occassional use out of the "Verkehrsverbund", to be lended elsewhere, but they are getting rare. I actually can't remember when I've last seen them.

In my city, the metro decided that this summer it will be fare-free on weekends. The bus operators count people in their system as they board. This is how they simply track the usage.

Depends on the transit agency. LA metro fare collection rate is probably 50% based on what I see. As others say the door sensors are the more reliable measure than the tap machine. Some train stations don’t have turnstyles and the ones that do don’t have the emergency gates alarmed anymore because people triggered them so much to avoid having to hurdle the turnstyle.

This could be done with Bluetooth or wifi sensors if you just need aggregate data

This is how (some?) travel time system work:

> Travel Time Systems work through the analysis of collected traffic data. This data can be collected via cellular providers, GPS vendors, mobile app vendors and most popularly through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Scanning. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning technology makes use of non-intrusive roadside sensors to detect the unique addresses of the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios inside of driver's vehicle and smartphone. By picking up a unique radio ID at one sensor location and then another these systems are able to calculate the travel time experienced from sensor A to sensor B for that unique vehicle/driver. These systems collect and calculate thousands of data points like this in order to determine the average travel time between any two sensors on the road.

* https://stinson.ca/its-solutions/bluetooth-wifi-travel-time-...

you could always use the guy collecting tickets to collect that information. or use turnstiles. or a myriad other ways.

Give everyone NFC cards to use the system but don't charge them?

Yeah, or have them still need to "buy" tickets and redeem them/scan them to get on.

Number of phones trying to connect to the train’s Wi-Fi.