I am a regular working stiff now and that means that I am also a commuter. To get to work I have to take two trains: New Jersey Transit and PATH. Every month I have to buy a monthly pass to ride NJ Transit but as I settled into my commute I quickly noticed a disturbing trend; my ticket was not being checked.
Since I payed $60 USD for my monthly pass I was kind of annoyed that my ticket wasn’t being checked. Every time I rode the train without a check, I was wasting money. Because of this, I decided to do a little experiment. I started keeping track of when my ticket was checked to see how much money I could be saving by not buying a monthly pass. My backup plan would be a standard one way ticket. Since a one way ticket does not expire, I would keep one in my wallet for a time when my ticket was checked.
The first month I conducted this test was August. In this month I rode the train a total of 40 times. Of those 40 times, my ticket was checked only 10 times. A one way ticket for my trip costs $2.25 USD. So for the month of august, if I just bought one way tickets, my travel costs would be $22.50 USD. That is $37.50 cheaper than a monthy pass. That’s quite a savings.
Because of my findings in August, I decided to continue my experiment through September. I wanted to gather more data to see if it August was just a fluke or if NJ Transit really doesn’t care. I will post my September results in part 2 of this story. Stay tuned.