Here in Helsinki, the public transport doesn't have access gates. Bus drivers check your ticket when you step in, but on trains, trams, and subway, you just step in [1]. The enforcement is done by inspectors who randomly board vehicles and check tickets. If you do not have one, you'll be charged a 100€ inspection fee, about 1.5 times the price of a monthly ticket.
The frequency at which I see inspectors suggests that it's slightly cheaper to never pay for a ticket, especially if you avoid them by e.g. leaving the train before they check your ticket [2]. Except of course, that dealing with the inspectors and paying the fine is extra work and negative feelings, and for me that flips the equation the other way around.
Not everyone minds that so much. Particularly, if you don't have any money, it can't be taken from you. There's also a more interesting dynamic here: some people have formed an insurance system where they have a group chat that pays the fines collectively whenever anyone gets one [3]. This is supposedly much cheaper than paying for the tickets.
This introduces a moral hazard [4]: since the cost of getting caught is largely externalized, one doesn't need to avoid getting caught as much. Of course, it's still some effort for you, and I'd assume anyone getting caught way too often will get kicked out of such groups.
I considered getting into one of these groups for journalistic purposes, but then decided it's way too much work anyway. One likely needs to know someone already in them to get in, and I wasn't interested in burning the social capital to source an invite. So, the next section will be based on educated guessing (read: pure speculation).
I'd also think it would be possible to scam such groups rather easily. While the payment details of the transport authority are easily verifiable, it's unlikely that they would pay every single fine by sending fifty transactions of 2€ each. Were I building this, there would be some kind of accounting system. Since I'm not, I assume they transfer money to the person getting the fine through MobilePay [5], and then that person pays the fine. If there are trust issues, they could require a receipt of the payment, too, but that won't help much as you can easily fake screenshots.
Of course, the natural, rather funny, and sadly illegal solution to this would be that the transportation agency itself would infiltrate these groups and flood them with just enough fake fines to make it infeasible to run them.
There's a neater system that these scammers haven't figured out yet [6]. Instead of paying the fines, you could have a pool of accounts with monthly tickets. I'd assume one ticket per ten people would easily do. Then you'd pick one ticket from that pool every time an inspector needs to see one. I assume that there are no data analysts working to catch this kind of thing, and if there are, you could increase your pool size and do timing and distance analysis to avoid it. A similar system could be used for almost any other subscription thing like streaming services [7].
Another interesting case of avoiding the ticket fare is using a fake ticket app. These show a ticket that looks like a valid ticket on your phone. You can show this to the bus driver to get in. This will not work with the inspectors, who check the QR code on the ticket. Showing a fake ticket is fraud, which is a rather serious crime and not just a 100€ fine. My understanding is that they prosecute these quite aggressively. One thing to note is that children under 15 years of age do not have criminal liability, and this can be (and is) abused.
A ticket costs a fixed amount of money, regardless of how many stops you ride. You basically either pay for 80 minutes or a month. There's no ticket for a five minute ride. This leaves a lot of value on the table. Anybody needing a lot of 5 minute rides then pays for a monthly ticket. Anybody who needs it twice a week walks or pays a huge premium for it. This is naturally a conscious decision: the main reasons are problems with enforcement, not wanting to have more complexity, and most importantly subsidising and incentivising regular users.
A similar thing happens with car parking. In my apartment building, there are a couple of parking spots reserved for visitors and such. They're always full. Then there's a parking lot which is quite expensive: renting a spot would cost perhaps 500-1000€ per year. I'd use a parking spot perhaps twenty days per year [8]. It would be really convenient, then, to have paid parking spots priced such that some were almost always unoccupied. They should cost so much that everybody who has a car all the time would rather pay for the parking lot. So if a parking lot spot is 1000€ per year, a paid spot must be at least 2.74€ per day so that it doesn't undercut the parking lot. Realistically it should probably be around 10€ per day. Short term rental of parking spots in the lot would also help with this.
So-called rideshare apps are super cheap sometimes, but the price is unpredictable. Even worse, the waiting time is unpredictable. And sometimes, I presume, the price is so low that drivers refuse to pick you up. I'd gladly pay more so that this doesn't happen, but the apps do not have this option. And if they did, I wouldn't trust it, as the incentives would look weird.
Once I ordered a regular old taxi to the airport at 5AM. The taxi driver told me that they had just been in the area fifteen minutes ago to drop someone off, and now they had to do a bit of useless back-and-forth driving. Why hadn't I preordered the taxi in the evening? Well, preordering costs 10€, and I've never had any trouble getting a ride. Why would I pay to make their job easier? Sadly, I didn't have the words to tell the taxi driver that.
This year after LWCW, I was staying in Berlin a bit longer. When I was going to our AirBnB with a friend, they questioned why I had bought a ticket. In their experience, inspections are quite rare and if you don't have a ticket, most of the time they just tell you to buy one instead of fining you. So the punishment of buying a ticket is having to buy one? Why would anybody buy a ticket, then?
Previously, I was of the opinion that one is supposed to exploit any and all weaknesses of systems, so that the bad guys aren't the only ones profiting. Nowadays I mostly do so only if the system leaves me feeling like a sucker for complying. Otherwise, it's just feeding the Moloch. The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.
Some high-volume bus routes also don't check tickets when you get in. ↩︎
This wildly varies between routes and travel hours. I also don't keep any real statistics on this and perhaps I'm just mistaken. ↩︎
"Moral hazard in insurance is when the existence of insurance makes it incentive-compatible for you to be imprudent in your own risk taking, expecting someone else to bear the consequences." -BitsAboutMoney: Banking in very uncertain times↩︎
I'm not too worried that publishing such an idea will lead to anyone exploiting it. People capable of that have much more profitable engagements available to them. ↩︎
When combined with a VPN. But that's more work than regular old piracy so nobody bothers with this. ↩︎
With a loaned or a rental car, or for a professional cleaning service to park ↩︎
Here in Helsinki, the public transport doesn't have access gates. Bus drivers check your ticket when you step in, but on trains, trams, and subway, you just step in [1] . The enforcement is done by inspectors who randomly board vehicles and check tickets. If you do not have one, you'll be charged a 100€ inspection fee, about 1.5 times the price of a monthly ticket.
The frequency at which I see inspectors suggests that it's slightly cheaper to never pay for a ticket, especially if you avoid them by e.g. leaving the train before they check your ticket [2] . Except of course, that dealing with the inspectors and paying the fine is extra work and negative feelings, and for me that flips the equation the other way around.
Not everyone minds that so much. Particularly, if you don't have any money, it can't be taken from you. There's also a more interesting dynamic here: some people have formed an insurance system where they have a group chat that pays the fines collectively whenever anyone gets one [3] . This is supposedly much cheaper than paying for the tickets.
This introduces a moral hazard [4] : since the cost of getting caught is largely externalized, one doesn't need to avoid getting caught as much. Of course, it's still some effort for you, and I'd assume anyone getting caught way too often will get kicked out of such groups.
I considered getting into one of these groups for journalistic purposes, but then decided it's way too much work anyway. One likely needs to know someone already in them to get in, and I wasn't interested in burning the social capital to source an invite. So, the next section will be based on educated guessing (read: pure speculation).
I'd also think it would be possible to scam such groups rather easily. While the payment details of the transport authority are easily verifiable, it's unlikely that they would pay every single fine by sending fifty transactions of 2€ each. Were I building this, there would be some kind of accounting system. Since I'm not, I assume they transfer money to the person getting the fine through MobilePay [5] , and then that person pays the fine. If there are trust issues, they could require a receipt of the payment, too, but that won't help much as you can easily fake screenshots.
Of course, the natural, rather funny, and sadly illegal solution to this would be that the transportation agency itself would infiltrate these groups and flood them with just enough fake fines to make it infeasible to run them.
There's a neater system that these scammers haven't figured out yet [6] . Instead of paying the fines, you could have a pool of accounts with monthly tickets. I'd assume one ticket per ten people would easily do. Then you'd pick one ticket from that pool every time an inspector needs to see one. I assume that there are no data analysts working to catch this kind of thing, and if there are, you could increase your pool size and do timing and distance analysis to avoid it. A similar system could be used for almost any other subscription thing like streaming services [7] .
Another interesting case of avoiding the ticket fare is using a fake ticket app. These show a ticket that looks like a valid ticket on your phone. You can show this to the bus driver to get in. This will not work with the inspectors, who check the QR code on the ticket. Showing a fake ticket is fraud, which is a rather serious crime and not just a 100€ fine. My understanding is that they prosecute these quite aggressively. One thing to note is that children under 15 years of age do not have criminal liability, and this can be (and is) abused.
A ticket costs a fixed amount of money, regardless of how many stops you ride. You basically either pay for 80 minutes or a month. There's no ticket for a five minute ride. This leaves a lot of value on the table. Anybody needing a lot of 5 minute rides then pays for a monthly ticket. Anybody who needs it twice a week walks or pays a huge premium for it. This is naturally a conscious decision: the main reasons are problems with enforcement, not wanting to have more complexity, and most importantly subsidising and incentivising regular users.
A similar thing happens with car parking. In my apartment building, there are a couple of parking spots reserved for visitors and such. They're always full. Then there's a parking lot which is quite expensive: renting a spot would cost perhaps 500-1000€ per year. I'd use a parking spot perhaps twenty days per year [8] . It would be really convenient, then, to have paid parking spots priced such that some were almost always unoccupied. They should cost so much that everybody who has a car all the time would rather pay for the parking lot. So if a parking lot spot is 1000€ per year, a paid spot must be at least 2.74€ per day so that it doesn't undercut the parking lot. Realistically it should probably be around 10€ per day. Short term rental of parking spots in the lot would also help with this.
So-called rideshare apps are super cheap sometimes, but the price is unpredictable. Even worse, the waiting time is unpredictable. And sometimes, I presume, the price is so low that drivers refuse to pick you up. I'd gladly pay more so that this doesn't happen, but the apps do not have this option. And if they did, I wouldn't trust it, as the incentives would look weird.
Once I ordered a regular old taxi to the airport at 5AM. The taxi driver told me that they had just been in the area fifteen minutes ago to drop someone off, and now they had to do a bit of useless back-and-forth driving. Why hadn't I preordered the taxi in the evening? Well, preordering costs 10€, and I've never had any trouble getting a ride. Why would I pay to make their job easier? Sadly, I didn't have the words to tell the taxi driver that.
This year after LWCW, I was staying in Berlin a bit longer. When I was going to our AirBnB with a friend, they questioned why I had bought a ticket. In their experience, inspections are quite rare and if you don't have a ticket, most of the time they just tell you to buy one instead of fining you. So the punishment of buying a ticket is having to buy one? Why would anybody buy a ticket, then?
Previously, I was of the opinion that one is supposed to exploit any and all weaknesses of systems, so that the bad guys aren't the only ones profiting. Nowadays I mostly do so only if the system leaves me feeling like a sucker for complying. Otherwise, it's just feeding the Moloch. The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero.
Some high-volume bus routes also don't check tickets when you get in. ↩︎
This wildly varies between routes and travel hours. I also don't keep any real statistics on this and perhaps I'm just mistaken. ↩︎
Source, in Finnish: https://yle.fi/a/74-20036911 ↩︎
"Moral hazard in insurance is when the existence of insurance makes it incentive-compatible for you to be imprudent in your own risk taking, expecting someone else to bear the consequences." -BitsAboutMoney: Banking in very uncertain times ↩︎
Local CashApp equivalent. ↩︎
I'm not too worried that publishing such an idea will lead to anyone exploiting it. People capable of that have much more profitable engagements available to them. ↩︎
When combined with a VPN. But that's more work than regular old piracy so nobody bothers with this. ↩︎
With a loaned or a rental car, or for a professional cleaning service to park ↩︎