In the Phoenix Metro area, the fares are capped, so you never pay beyond the cap for daily, weekly, or monthly fares.

If you ride and pay your fare twice, then every ride after that, for the rest of the day, is free. That is very nice. So if you commute and you have a transfer, and you're taking 4 rides per day, then you're saving half of that in fares.

In the old days, you would pay a cash fare and the bus operator could issue a paper transfer ticket. The transfer would be good for a few hours. So your fare was basically per-trip. But the system couldn't track people paying cash fares like that, so there were no free rides without the transfer ticket. If you took two trips a day, like a normal commute, you'd pay at least two fares. Now, with pre-loaded cards or fares on the mobile app, you can track all that stuff, and reload when necessary.

For disabled people or whoever qualifies for "Reduced Fare", your fare costs half ($1.00 instead of $2.00) and so your daily maximum is only $2.00. A really good deal.

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em-bee 19 hours ago | parent [-]

technically, possessing two transfer tickets from the same day could be used as proof that you paid enough for the day.

vienna has day tickets that cost as much as two single tickets but you can only buy them on a strip of 8 which you can use one day at a time over an unlimited period

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ButlerianJihad 19 hours ago | parent [-]

No, they were not proof of anything. They were nearly worthless, and people discarded them all the time. You could collect a fistful of them on and around the bus.

Anyway, that is not how the fare system worked with paper transfers. There were no caps at all. You either paid full fare, or you showed a valid transfer. If you didn't have the transfer, then you paid again and again on any given day. The fare caps only came into use when the system was capable of tracking them, for example a unique preloaded or prepaid card.

Now I have limited experience with American public transit, so perhaps there were some "capped fare" systems in the 1980s or before, but I never saw one that worked that way.

	▲	em-bee 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		i was talking about how to potentially implement a capped system on paper, not about an actual implementation. if two strips would give you free rides for the rest of the day you probably would not throw them away. i know the but ticket system from los angeles 25 years ago. you could use each strip only once because you had to hand them in. i think you got a second strip on the next bus so you could potentially make an unlimited chain. if people would throw them away then only because they got one they didn't use. you were also not allowed to use the strip for a return trip on the same route.