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| Re: Sometimes farebeating is OK, says NYC Councilman Jackson (1158995) | |||
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Re: Sometimes farebeating is OK, says NYC Councilman Jackson |
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Posted by WillD on Mon May 28 20:55:09 2012, in response to Re: Sometimes farebeating is OK, says NYC Councilman Jackson, posted by SelkirkTMO on Mon May 28 18:18:06 2012. A more appropriate consideration might be imagining that grocery store with absolutely no staff inside it, yet the door is open. No cashiers, no security guard.Those accouterments may be possible at a for-profit retail outlet, but the MTA is under increasing pressure to reduce their budget and the easiest place to do so is at the station level as many other systems have demonstrated with nearly unmanned stations. To a certain extent the MTA can chalk the resultant increase in fare evasion up as a loss against the money saved on station personnel, and I suspect that is what Councilman Jackson was referring to. But the MTA has the law on its side and ultimately the customer suffers in the name of reducing labor costs. IMHO rather than bringing back station agents the MTA would be better off setting up a call center and equipping their fare gate lines with a kiosk featuring a phone, camera, and keyboard on which to contact that call center regarding ticket issues. Give the call center personnel the ability to rectify the sort of minor ticket issues, and have them generate the maintenance requests for the fare collection personnel responsible for the fare gates and TVMs. Of course the simplest thing to do would just be to finally implement a systemwide smartcard. Cubic may be crap, but at the very least it should have been a modular system and thus upgrading shouldn't be a particularly painful process. The RFID readers are far and away more robust than their magnetic counterparts. The only problems I've observed essentially all come down to passback errors and the occasional gate in need of a reboot to reset its reader. Getting the regular paying customers off the magnetic strip system would go a long way toward improving the MTBF of the faregates. IMHO the MTA would be better off putting an end to their half-measures and trials with assorted banks and just committing to an Oyster card like system with the back end to support contactless credit card payments as well. |
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