[adrianmonk]

Also, it's possible (if unusual) to get value out of traveling within the BART system.

For example, suppose you have a nice camera you want to sell to a friend. They live in Millbrae and commute to SF by BART. You live in north San Jose.

So you agree to meet them on their way home from work, at 6pm right outside the Powell Street station. That's $16.80 for your Berryessa to Powell Street round trip.

But what if you met inside the station instead? For your purposes, that's fine too. You can hand them the camera in either place. Should that trip be free because you enter and leave the BART system at Berryessa? I would say no, because getting to SF was valuable to you, plus you used a seat on two BART trains.

[sbuttgereit]

Of course, you're right: it is absolutely feasible that such a valuable trip is possible and happens. You're right that a truly valuable trip is rightfully charged a fare. And finally you're also right that such trips are probably unusual. I would go so far as to say rare.

What's much more common than that rare scenario is that, after paying a fare, you get down to the platform only to find that there's a long delay in the system, there are too many people trying to get on the trains, or something similar that causes you to leave the station to find saner transport. I've been bitten by this on BART, more than once. At stations in the heart of the city you "start the trip" triggering the fare long before you can see any of the platforms to know whether or not you should enter.

Back to the point. The problem isn't that you're wrong in asserting a valuable excursion trip is possible, but that you use that fact to rationalize the charging of a fare while ignoring the much more common cases where you'd charge a fare while delivering no value for money. Once you consider the complete picture it becomes clear that the right thing to do is build policy around the common case, not the rare/hypothetical one. It would be better to eat the cost of the rare valuable trip BART should charge for so that they don't charge people for trips they couldn't actually deliver.

[jonny_eh]

It's amazing the lengths people will go to in order to defend an unfair status quo.

[adrianmonk]

The point of my comment wasn't to take a position on whether the excursion fare is good or bad. That's a trade-off with pros and cons. Your position is that the cons greatly outweigh the pros, and you make a very reasonable argument for that.

However, what the original article said is different. It said the excursion fare "exists solely to make money" and "it is a scam" (emphasis mine). As if there is no conceivable rationale at all for the existence of excursion fares and the only possible way to see it is that BART is simply greedy.

BART may be greedy, or maybe they're just not seeing the balance of pros and cons. I don't know. I thought the article went overboard in being so confident that BART's motives are definitely nefarious.

TLDR: It's not that I'm favor of the excursion fare; it's that I'm against articles with hyperbolic melodrama.

[googlryas]

They could just let you exit normally and not pay any fare if you entered the station less than 8 minutes ago, or whatever would be an amount of time that you couldn't realistically ride somewhere, enjoy another station, and then ride back.

Though I guess people would just tap in, tap out immediately but don't exit the turnstiles, then just get on a train and exit through the emergency exit at whatever station you want for free.

[Psyonic]

"Though I guess people would just tap in, tap out immediately but don't exit the turnstiles, then just get on a train and exit through the emergency exit at whatever station you want for free."

Sure, or just jump the turnstiles and exist through the emergency exit on the other end, which I already see people do frequently.

[googlryas]

Sure, but jumping the turnstiles is clearly ipso facto breaking the rules. Re-tapping where you entered but not exiting immediately could be explained away. I bet far more people would cheat if they only had to tap to exit and not exit, versus jumping turnstiles.

[elcomet]

They could check that you leave the station within 5 min