Fraudulent Use of CTA Passes

[sw4400]

I don't know if sw's example where mommy was asked to pay a cash fare is because the child was not enrolled in a participating school,  but it seems like an outlier.

To clarify, the "11-year old" was paying in cash... no card was presented or anything. She just put $1.10 in on a Saturday without an I.D or anything. That's what incited this whole thing.

[andrethebusman]

The 75-cent "student fare" was a political sop dreamed up by Emanuel/Claypool (two bodies, one brain). It has degenerated into anybody who goes to any school pays 75 at any time. It does very little to argue the point.

Until a few years back, before all this started, it was very simple. Anybody 12-64 paid full fare 24/7, anybody 7-11 paid reduced fare 24/7. School kids (grammar and high school) paid reduced fare before noon going towards a school (I.e. at any stop), from noon to 830pm IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY of a school only. When I was going to school at Lane many years back, you HAD to get on the Addison bus at Western, Artesian, or Maplewood ONLY. If you walked over to Oakley, the drivers made you pay full rate.

Also, if you were an "oversized kid", the CTA had a card you could get that was proof you were still under 12. This somehow got discontinued over the years.

As for "overuse of a free ride permit", this is really not possible when you get right down to it. Ever since the CTA started monthly passes in the 1980's, they were "unlimited ride" passes, and still are. When the senior/disabled/military etc free ride passes started over the years, nobody at CTA ever put any kind of maximum use limits on them. The predecessors to the disabled passes, if you remember, was back in the 1970's when DCFS bought tokens and cards good for a transfer from CTA in bulk and distributed them to aid recipients so they could ostensibly look for a job. However, they only gave out so many tokens and cards per month per person. What went wrong was when DCFS decided it would be easier for them to get the CTA to issue a "poor pass" that they would then give out that was unlimited. Why CTA went along with it is a good question, because it cost them a tremendous amount of revenue. But that is politics.

Remember the Sunday Supertransfers? Remember why they were discontinued? I was a ticket agent at the time, and I remember very well how after about 2pm on a Sunday you didn't take in any money at all. 100% Supertransfers. Those that bought them in the morning when they were done riding for the day would give them to somebody on the street who would then use them all evening.

 

[Busjack]

...

Remember the Sunday Supertransfers? Remember why they were discontinued? I was a ticket agent at the time, and I remember very well how after about 2pm on a Sunday you didn't take in any money at all. 100% Supertransfers. Those that bought them in the morning when they were done riding for the day would give them to somebody on the street who would then use them all evening.

 

At least the RTA cards have a picture and a 16 digit number. The driver can look at the picture; conversely the number led to the letters mentioned in the first post.

I would have figured legitimate use of the SuperTransfer would have led to that result, but I can see the illegal trading point. Going back to those days, I would ignore those begging for "bus fare," but thought "what if I just gave them my transfer," except I wasn't going to mess with anyone at Garfield-Dan Ryan.

[Busjack]

The 2016 budget, page 24 (28 of the pdf) has the explanation of the threshold that triggered what was reported at the top of this thread.