Travelers subway fare swap
December 9, 2006 10:43 PM Subscribe
Looking for suggestions on how to organize and promote an exchange of unused subway fare cards for travelers from Ann Arbor to DC, NYC, SF. Leaning towards a design that minimizes writing code.
I'm heading out to DC Sunday and had to dig around to find the remnants of the last fare - that should have been easy and an opportunity to socialize with the last person who came back with a partly full Metrocard.
Response by poster: Thanks for the ideas and suggestions of sites to try to grab eyeballs from, Jessamyn. The repeating Craigslist ad sounds like a good one.
I have an existing weekly meetup at an Asian bakery downtown with enough of a core of travelers to get something started, so maybe it grows out of that. I added a bit to the Yahoo group weekly autopost for that meeting announcement, updated the upcoming.org event listing, and have started the hunt for that good URL.
I wonder if 43 places might be a good place to point to this too.
In Ann Arbor the usual mode of transportation is car, shuttle, shared ride, but not bus to the airport - no public transit available to the airport.
posted by edwardvielmetti at 9:36 PM on December 11, 2006
I have an existing weekly meetup at an Asian bakery downtown with enough of a core of travelers to get something started, so maybe it grows out of that. I added a bit to the Yahoo group weekly autopost for that meeting announcement, updated the upcoming.org event listing, and have started the hunt for that good URL.
I wonder if 43 places might be a good place to point to this too.
In Ann Arbor the usual mode of transportation is car, shuttle, shared ride, but not bus to the airport - no public transit available to the airport.
posted by edwardvielmetti at 9:36 PM on December 11, 2006
Nice idea that I was thinking about also (within NYC).
Not to rain on your parade, but to give you a constructive point to consider, is that NYC MTA law does not allow for "sharing" of Unlimited Metrocards.
But if you wanted to share let's say, Pay Per Ride cards, you could do that in the NYC area, though there is less incentive for cost saving, since one could easily purchase it.
posted by redhotchips at 12:57 PM on December 12, 2006
Not to rain on your parade, but to give you a constructive point to consider, is that NYC MTA law does not allow for "sharing" of Unlimited Metrocards.
But if you wanted to share let's say, Pay Per Ride cards, you could do that in the NYC area, though there is less incentive for cost saving, since one could easily purchase it.
posted by redhotchips at 12:57 PM on December 12, 2006
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Granted, this is not social, but it does solve the problem. Otherwise, I would think about visualizing places where people who travel are likely looking already -- CL rideshare, Kayak.com, hotels.com, couchsurfing.com -- and thinking of ways that you could hook into those eyeballs to get people to share fares. I mean it's a nice assonant idea, it should be possible to scope a good URL and get a freecycle type of RSS feed going where people can get a feed of where they're going and post a note on where they've been. Of course, whether or not such fares are NON TRANFERABLE will detemine how much of a hurdle it's going to be to even consider such an idea, but as a frequent traveler, I think it's a great one.
posted by jessamyn at 12:01 AM on December 10, 2006