Jason Shiga (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} shiga) wrote,@ 2003-03-21 12:41:00 |
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BART Story (part I)
When I was a kid I had this scam running with BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). It’s a little difficult to explain but the way BART works is that you buy a ticket and enter it at one station. Depending on the station you exit, it will charge you appropriately. For example going from Oakland to San Francisco could cost you around $2.50. But going from a station to another one just 5 blocks away would only cost $1.15.
So if one has an old ticket that was entered at say 16th in SF but not used to exit (how one gets such a ticket I’ll get to in a minute) then one could theoretically enter the BART at 19th in Oakland and use that old ticket to exit at 24th in SF. And coming back, I could enter at 16th and use my ticket from that morning to exit at 12th in Oakland. In practice it’s not that simple as there’s some gates that are programmed to check if the ticket is over 4 hours old. As far as I could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to indicate which gates they were and I ended up making elaborate maps plotting the location of defunct gates in over 20 stations. Honestly, it was a rather fun project. It’s like LARPing for people who don’t have friends.
This was all to save $1.35 by the way (or 67 sticks of Bazooka Joe Bubblegum, the currency by which I measured all things back then). However, I figured I went to San Francisco maybe 50 times a year. This would add up to over $2000 by the time I hit age 26. Well I’m 26 now and let’s just I’m set to buy 100,000 sticks of Bazooka Joe Bubblegum.
To be continued…
When I was a kid I had this scam running with BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). It’s a little difficult to explain but the way BART works is that you buy a ticket and enter it at one station. Depending on the station you exit, it will charge you appropriately. For example going from Oakland to San Francisco could cost you around $2.50. But going from a station to another one just 5 blocks away would only cost $1.15.
So if one has an old ticket that was entered at say 16th in SF but not used to exit (how one gets such a ticket I’ll get to in a minute) then one could theoretically enter the BART at 19th in Oakland and use that old ticket to exit at 24th in SF. And coming back, I could enter at 16th and use my ticket from that morning to exit at 12th in Oakland. In practice it’s not that simple as there’s some gates that are programmed to check if the ticket is over 4 hours old. As far as I could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to indicate which gates they were and I ended up making elaborate maps plotting the location of defunct gates in over 20 stations. Honestly, it was a rather fun project. It’s like LARPing for people who don’t have friends.
This was all to save $1.35 by the way (or 67 sticks of Bazooka Joe Bubblegum, the currency by which I measured all things back then). However, I figured I went to San Francisco maybe 50 times a year. This would add up to over $2000 by the time I hit age 26. Well I’m 26 now and let’s just I’m set to buy 100,000 sticks of Bazooka Joe Bubblegum.
To be continued…
