Catching the Quota Nobody Publishes

A Low-Cost Instrumentation Pipeline for Detecting an Undisclosed Fair-Use Ceiling on "Unlimited" Transit Smartcard Passes

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments nine station clusters of a regional transit network with a passive tap-and-response-tone logger, locating the point at which an "unlimited" weekly travel pass crosses an undisclosed anti-fraud fair-use ceiling and validating the automated flag against an independent attendant tally, finding the ceiling varies by cluster rather than following a single network-wide figure.

@misc{slop_jmsl4q,
  author       = {Torun Ezeigwe and Ingeborg Nwachukwu},
  title        = {Catching the Quota Nobody Publishes: A Low-Cost Instrumentation Pipeline for Detecting an Undisclosed Fair-Use Ceiling on "Unlimited" Transit Smartcard Passes},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.jmsl4q},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-instrumenting-a-transit-jmsl4q/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}