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| Re: How do OMNY card users prove they paid SBS fares? (1639704) | |||
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Re: How do OMNY card users prove they paid SBS fares? |
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Posted by Stephen Bauman on Mon Mar 3 07:36:05 2025, in response to Re: How do OMNY card users prove they paid SBS fares?, posted by r17-6599 on Mon Mar 3 00:25:18 2025. a person in Queens was accused of a crime. His lawyer won the case by proving the client wasn't at the crime scene by calling up the record of his client's Metro card, which showed all the transactions and fare payments...Can the MTA's inspectors do this?The relevant question is how quickly can this be done. All trip histories are eventually downloaded into a central database. However, the process must take dead zones and communication outages into account. So some immediate information is stored on the Metrocard or OMNY for quick retrieval. However, the amount of data that can be stored on either card is limited. There has to be a data purge mechanism for destroying trip information at a certain point - preferably after the data has been uploaded to the central database. How the data is stored on the central database determines how easy or difficult it is to retrieve information. It might be relatively easy to determine a particular Metrocard's use for a relatively recent time period. I'd suspect it would be more difficult and time consuming to determine who else might have been on a particular bus at a certain time, if the database were not designed to answer that particular question. A fare inspector on an SBS bus would require an immediate response for whether its holder paid a fare. The lawyer in the case you mentioned could afford to wait a week before receiving the answer. Another point is how willing the MTA is willing to answer such questions. There was a recent request on the MTA Developers Forum for some information regarding which downtown expresses left Grand Central over a certain time period. The request came from the husband of a woman who was robbed on a train. The police told the husband they were stymied because they could not proceed without knowing exactly which train the wife took. I and another person were able to supply that information by looking at the static GTFS (me) and real time GTFS (other person) archives that we kept. The question was fairly easy to answer. I suspect NYPD's stated difficulty came either from their interest in closing the case or the MTA's reluctance to release such information. I've experienced both, so fixing blame is a toss up. |
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