Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Massachusetts convinced a federal judge to lift a gag order on three MIT students who researched flaws in the MBTA’s fare payment system. Essentially, the students had found a way to ride free forever — but they weren’t sharing critical details that would allow others to exploit their discovery.
The MBTA responded by getting a temporary restraining order on Aug. 9 that prevented the students from discussing their findings any further, even though their research was based on publicly available information.
That’s exactly the wrong response. We raised questions about the security of other systems the MBTA was putting in place for the Charlie Card and Charlie Ticket more than three years ago, and we wish that the MBTA would focus on ensuring the security of its systems instead of trying to silence the messengers. It’s better to find out that there are problems in a system like this through the marketplace of ideas than through a malicious attack.
What I found outrageous about the whole thing is that the judge ordered the students to turn over their security analysis to the MBTA.
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p>Since when can the courts seize private research and turn it over to public agencies? If the MBTA hired a consultant to draw up the same kind of analysis, they would probably pay someone $100k – or $200k if that firm was connected to a state politician.
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p>A good lawyer could probably parlay that into a big payout.
Usage of public transportation would likely skyrocket, and they could make back lost revenue in advertising, payments from their concessionaires, and real estate development of property they own in and around stations. The T might be the Google of public transportation authorities: ad supported services.
… I had heard (no cite) that the T has the lowest percentage of fare generated revenue of the major metropolitan subway systems.
but I don’t see how the number of additional riders thanks to free service would generate enough advertising revenue to overcome the lost revenue.
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p>Of course, if you’re not charging, you also reduce a bunch of costs. You don’t need CharlieCards. You don’t need kiosks to sell/recharge them. You don’t need people to collect the money in them and to repair them. You don’t need turnstiles. You don’t need to only open the front freakin’ door on the Green Line above ground.
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p>Then again, it also means that you don’t have as accurate a count of how many people are riding each part of the system. Plus, it means there’s nothing to keep kids and bums from hopping on and off all day/night/weekend because they’re bored and want to be a pain in the arse.
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p>Finally, it means an even-more commercialization of the T. Ever seen a billboard ad for beer on a yellow schoolbus? How many kids ride the T to public school?
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p>It’s certainly a tremendously interesting idea, worthy of further consideration. Personally, I like the idea of not selling “single rider” passes. Sell daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly passes, and make them cheap. Heck, maybe tie it in with the state income tax returns, and give one annual pass to each return with AGI less than some threshold.
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p>There could be all kinds of creativity, but not with the forward funding scheme the MBTA has now. They’re trying to save their boat from sinking by bailing out water with spoons, and now trying to give one of those silver spoons to management raises instead of using it to bail out a little more water.
In the FY08 budget:
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p>Fare Revenues (all modes): $430,099,182
Advertising Revenues: $11,000,000
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p>You’re going to need one heckuva ridership increase.
A study was done a while back (the 70s IIRC?) that showed that the T spent more money on the infrastructure of fare collecting – at the time, selling and collecting tokens as well as turnstile maintenance & staffing – than it got from those fares. I’m sure the numbers would be rather different now, and I don’t know whether the balance would fall on the positive or negative side, but it’s obvious that a fairly large portion of T expenses could be entirely done away with if they didn’t charge user fees for riding the T.
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p>It’s too bad they just spend so much money on this poorly-impletemented CharlieCard system (and I’m not just talking about card security, there are all sorts of other flaws, including the poorly-usable entry gates that slow down long lines, make it impossible to get into some stations while a train is there, etc.) We couldn’t get that money back, and IMO it was worse than a waste (the negative value greatly exceeds the amount actually spent).
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p>We should move to a model for the T more similar to the one we use for roads & sidewalks & public parks & bike paths: A general good, paid for by the general fund. We’re all better off when transportion & pubic space infrastructure is there available for everyone to use. All of us pay, in proportions set by the tax code, for everyone else’s sidewalks, regardless of which sidewalks we actually walk on ourselves, and none of us have to pay a user fee for each specific incident of sidewalk-use we talk advantage of. We all benefit from people being able to get around safely and conveniently. Businesses get customers (which generates more tax revenue and more jobs), people can visit their friends and family, we have more opportunities for art & culture & public life – the T is part of that.
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p>Charging per-use fees for the T is an inherently broken model that serves to severely limit the benefit the T can provide to the areas it serves. The revenue it brings in A) isn’t as large as it seems, because you have to take into consideration all the money spent on revenue-collection infrastructure & staffing, and B) denies us of a value that is much larger than the revenue itself.