A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares

Re:A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares by GuiA on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @01:54PM (#7299595)

When I first moved to SF as a poor grad student doing a summer internship, your Clipper card could go in the negative (for example if you had $2 on it and took a $5 route, you'd be at -$3). Getting a new Clipper card was only something like $1.50; if you took the Caltrain/BART often (expensive routes), it'd almost always be advantageous to buy a clipper card with as little cash on it as possible, toss your card away when it was in the negative and just buy a new one every time.

I wish Fast Company had written an article about me at the time :( (and this was "legal" too, whereas the technique described in the article is illegal since you're not allowed to transfer payment titles, per BART's/Muni's policies)

(I believe you can't do that anymore - that the maximum negative balance that you can get to is now the same as the price of a new Clipper card)

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Re:A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares by pavel_lishin on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @02:05PM (#7299683)

I always thought it was pretty grim that Boston's "Charlie Card" was named after a man who was 'trapped' in the subway system because he couldn't afford to pay his way out.

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Re:A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares by ars on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @03:26PM (#7300222)

Charlie is not a real person, it's a song.

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Re:A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares by pavel_lishin on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @05:10PM (#7301002)

Yeah, I should have made that clearer in my comment. I still think it's a bit morbid.

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Re:A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares by Zikes on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @02:03PM (#7299664)

    I wish Fast Company had written an article about me 
    at the time :(

Not enough Big Data.

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Re:A Twitter Data Scientist Hacks San Francisco's Subway Fares by silencio on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @02:43PM (#7299919)

The minimum balance required to enter is now $1.75, which I think is the minimum BART fare. (The minimums depend on which transit system you use.) You can't go negative at all, so you have to add your fare to the card before you can leave.

But a lot of this was due to the fact that they had no Clipper loading capability inside the fare gates as far as I can tell. The signs announcing the change seemed to come up at the same time the old add fare machines were retrofitted with Clipper.

On the bright side, BART does offer small discounts based on usage (which only makes sense for a distance-based fare, as opposed to weekly/monthly passes) so there's that.

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