And in #GoodNews...
"From Sunday, a price cap means Auckland Transport users will be charged a maximum $50 a week, regardless of how often they use services... Public Transport Users' Association's national coordinator Jon Reeves applauded the move. He said it should be rolled out in other cities, including Wellington and Christchurch."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/522688/auckland-public-transport-fare-caps-rolled-out
Then in not so good news...
"Christchurch's buses and ferries are set to go cashless from the second half of next year in a bid to improve safety... "The move would double as a national pilot in cashless public transport."
Uh, no. Auckland Transport did it at least a year and a 1/2 ago. It bothered me then and now. In the absence of a digital payment method that's as anonymous as cash, refusing to accept cash ought to be illegal.
#PublicTransport Christchurch #cash
@inlaing
> the only resistance to *tracking* I can have is refusing to register my card... Which is a pretty meaningless resistance
Indeed. Even unregistered cards create a dataset about a person making a series of trips, complete with dates, times, and the places they got on and off (thanks to the GPS on buses etc). DataFarmers have massive pools of such data, and spare compute, and devise all sorts of clever ways of finding enough correlations to add that dataset to someone's shadow profile.
@jonathanharker That's a common misconception. Legal tender cannot be refused _for payment of a debt_. It's perfectly legal to refuse to make a sale/provide a service in the first place, in which case no debt accrues.
(Article at https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/-/media/project/sites/rbnz/files/publications/bulletins/2015/2015sep78-6.pdf goes into this in more legalese.)
@zeborah
> legal tender cannot be refused _for payment of a debt_. It's perfectly legal to refuse to make a sale/provide a service in the first place, in which case no debt accrues
Ah! I'd been wondering what legal loophole was allowing this, thanks for the clarification. I guess if a private vendor won't sell you their car unless you pay in crypto (or signed copies of Pink Floyd's The Wall for that matter), I wouldn't want that to be illegal.
(1/2)
But public transport and other natural monopolies - whether publicly owned and operated or not - ought to be legally obliged to accept cash. At least until there's some kind of widely accepted digital cash that's just as privacy-respecting as notes and coins (obviously no existing crypto meets both these conditions, if either).
(2/2)
@rai Huh, it's gone down: it used to be essentially "free after 10 paid trips in a week" which would be $20. I wonder when that changed?
(I have an auto-topup set on my card since I have to travel what used to be 2 zones to work, so used to be paying something like $36 a week which was a pain to keep up with manually. Hence not noticing the lower outgoing in comparison.)
Strypey
Inlaing
Jonathan Harker
Zeborah
Rai
Greg Hills