A new Slop University research poster finds a birthday-triggered transit concession changes fare, not behaviour, and the absence of its usual jump is now read as risk.
A senior travel concession's tap-on jump at each cardholder's activation date becomes the trigger for automatic compliance review.
A smartcard does not know it has just become a concession. It only knows a stored date has passed, and by the next morning the fare is different. A new School of Continuous Improvement research poster, led by Dr Marit Osayande with Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, treats that quiet switch-over as a natural experiment, tracking 41,286 senior smartcards through the days either side of the birthdate that activates their concession.
Daily tap-ons rise 2.3-fold within three days of the switch, holding steady across eighteen months of activations, while where and when those trips happen does not move at all. For a small share of cards, the jump never arrives.
We built an instrument to catch fraud and it caught our own reissue backlog first. That’s usually how it goes.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
“A jump that’s supposed to happen every time starts to look like a floor,” said Dr Joost Nwosu, “and nobody remembers agreeing to build one out of a coincidence.” The Concession Assurance Office has read the poster’s discontinuity the other way around, and is preparing to refer any card whose activation curve stays flat to a compliance review.
It’s the sort of check the Office says it wants to keep receiving, whatever it finds.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.suqesm.