The Red Line between Hollywood and Union Station must be the greatest free subway ride in the world.
You can hop a train and buzz straight downtown and back without seeing a turnstile, ticket taker or even anyone in MTA uniform at any of the stops. But for the bored drone of the driver calling out the station stops, you'd think the line were staffed by the ghosts of the tunnel workers who died during its construction.
We did it today - took the kids on down to Olvera Street - without encountering a single barrier (human or mechanical) that ensured we'd paid for the ride ...
The ticket-dispensing machines at both ends are rife with what folks in the new-gadget biz call "barriers to adoption:"
They balk like asthmatic Yugos with bad starters. They demand that you read a horrific mishmash of flowcharts and needlessly blinking lights closely just to figure out what magical sequence of button-pushing and money-shoving will actually deliver your tickets. They hate anything less than crisp, freshly-minted bills that were cut precisely (and not a 16th of an inch "off" as seems to happen with the new "offset" bill design.
And they're dog-slow - always managing to chew on the bills for a while before spitting them out without explanation or encouragement.
It took us about 10 minutes to scrape together enough clean bills between us that the finicky optical readers would deign to accept (even the change machine was on the blink) and then trudge through the steps of paying; Each step seemed to be separated from the next by a good 20 seconds during which the machines - which sport processors dumber than the average Hello Kitty digital watch - buzzed, whirred and ... just ... thought to themselves.
God help Metro and its riders if people ever suddenly choose to rely on it as heavily as commuters do in better-equipped cities. A crowd spoiled by Washington DC's whipcrack magnetic farecard system would back up at the MTA's machines in a line snaking out and around the Chinese about 20 times until the queue blended seamlessly with people waiting for "Revenge of the Sith" to open.
If we weren't honest straphangers, the MTA would have come away $10 lighter today - and never known the difference.
Looks like we're not alone, too:
RidingTransit.com noted last March that he left his transit pass at home - and no one noticed:
On the commute home, I took some MTA tokens from work for the ride back to Hollywood, but because I'm so used to just getting on the train, I completely forgot to buy a ticket, and rode all the way to Hollywood. Fortunately, there were no officers checking fare on my trip, so I avoided the $250 fine.
Last May, the MTA board voted to spend $4.7 million to add 60 more fare inspectors to the system, which does not use turnstiles to collect tickets. (There are now 110 total inspectors.) The main reason was to free up deputies for more crime prevention and surveillance. The fare evasion rate was just 2.24 percent last year, barely denting the more than $223 million in rail and bus fares shelled out by riders, according to MTA figures.
But then, how would they have any way of knowing?
Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, January 17, 2005 - 11:19 PM
