> If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too.
Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it.
If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway.
> There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.
Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.
That's not quite true, what they can measure with the "tap on tap off devices" is people's movement patterns (point to point). That is valuable data that you can't really get just by counting people on and off or taking cash.
Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it.
If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway.
> There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.
Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.