Talk:Honor system

Transportation
The main article's text under Transportation reads: "The local government may find it impractical or overly expensive to install ticket-checking turnstiles at every station, and instead rely on casual human surveillance to check if all train riders possess tickets. In such a system one could thus ride the train without paying, and simply hope to be lucky enough to avoid a random ticket check during the trip. Though unethical, such behavior is impossible for an honor system by itself to prevent, although the behavior can be reduced by enforcing penalties for those who are caught cheating the system." By opting for casual human surveillance and charging a fee over physical ticket-checking turnstiles at every station entrance, the local government has effectively introduced a second means of paying for ones ride. By not installing turnstiles, it is implied that the government has done a cost/benefit analysis on the installation of turnstiles (high initial capital investment) and found that a more cost-effective solution is to employ a human ticket checker who issues penalty tickets at a cost greater than a standard ticket fare. In practice, one could ride the train and get caught without a standard ticket by human surveillance on every on every single ride and be perfectly happy paying an increased "penalty" fee each time. If the penalty is only an increased monetary cost (with no further legal disincentives) and the increased price of the penalty fee is still viewed as reasonable from the ticketless riders perspective, is this still considered unethical? Or is it simply electing to utilize one form of payment that the system has in place over another? If no turnstiles are present, riding without a ticket can only be argued as unethical if there is nobody checking tickets after boarding. BrainWrench (talk) 06:07, 24 May 2010 (UTC)