Non-paying STM passengers count up
More than a million instances of non‑paying passengers were clocked up by the STM in 2023, depriving it of more than $2 million in revenue. For the same period, the STM saw 288 million passages that were paid for.
I’m sure the STM would like to have that money, but how much would they have to spend to enforce the law?
Speaking of the STM, CTV reports on some unusual imagery being used by the transit commission on TikTok.
Adding later, La Presse’s analysis of the rebounding of metro service stoppages and how they follow the overall number of passengers. The second bar graph, showing the number of users, reveals that while ridership has risen from a trough in 2020 and 2021, it is not nearly back to its previous numbers.
Nicholas 09:51 on 2024-06-29 Permalink
That’s a small amount of slippage, and it’s hard to get much closer to zero. Though as they say, this is only cases employees notice, but also includes monthly pass holders who don’t tap, which they apparently don’t do 15% to 25% of the time. And they don’t mention all the times the bus fare box is out of service and they waive you on.
Blork 12:15 on 2024-06-29 Permalink
I agree with Nicholas. It’s no biggie. A certain amount of slippage is to be expected, and this is well within the acceptable range I would think.
Ephraim 17:21 on 2024-06-29 Permalink
What an annoying article. It doesn’t say what percentage of income that is. So we don’t know if it’s worth it to try to capture it. Pareto’s principle… the cost to try to get to 100% might just be too high to bother. And what’s the machine error rate? The number of people with valid travel documents that the system misses when someone passes.
walkerp 20:45 on 2024-06-29 Permalink
That’s not correct to say they lost $2 million in revenue. It’s potential revenue because how many of those people would have actually paid for the ride?