I think we should get rid of both and just make Transit "free"
That is a very unpopular idea with politicians but I love it
Yes make it free, but they still need data on how many are using it for budget and scheduling considerations so... we still need a way to count riders.
At the actual point of transit maybe? Count people as they enter/exit the vehicle rather than at a preceding gate! This seems like it'd provide the highest quality data about route utilization as well because there'd be anonymized data of fairly precise ridership, including both onboarding and offboarding locations to (hopefully) calibrate better reach and scheduling. (I don't actually know if this is the case, but it intuitively makes sense to me. (plus it doesn't penalize people who may need to access a station for non-transit reasons either (such as needing to shelter during an emergency))
That’s actually how commuter rail and intercity rail work, the issue is that conductors would be inefficient and inefficient on short distance high capacity metros













