Human Transit

the US$1 bill abolition campaign begins with you!

On my post about the transit speed benefits of abolishing the US$1 bill, many commenters re-emphasised that $1 coins do exist, and that the US Mint wants to promote them, but that they are failing to catch on with the public.   Cashiers encounter resistance when they give them out in change, and the resulting back and forth with the customer takes far more time than it's worth, so even a cashier with revolutionary impulses learns it's just easier to give out dollar bills.    

I wonder if a concerted high-visibility campaign in one transit-intensive US city might drive the issue to prominence.  It wouldn't even need to come from the government.  Suppose, for example, that one prominent locally-based merchant in, say, San Francisco announced that from now on, they'd be giving out only $1 coins as change.  This could be one of those good-corporate-citizen moves, designed to support transit patronage by putting dollar coins in people's pockets.   (I suspect they would also find that the change would result in faster service for the merchant's customers, since coins are faster to grab and count than bills.)

Why has nobody done this by now?  Was it tried, and if so, what was the resistance?  It clearly would need to be a campaign, with some media buzz so that customers knew what to expect.  But I have trouble imagining that the resistance would be so great in a place like the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, be the change you seek.  From commenter "Calwatch" 

Like one of the above posters said, the best way to show your support is to buy the coins and spend them. Luckily, the US Mint is selling them - $250 at a time - on your credit card.

http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/

Some enterprising people have used their 2% cash return credit cards and are just ordering boxes of them and wheeling them direct to the bank, thousands of them at a time, which defeats the whole purpose of the program. But, if your transit agency doesn't accept credit cards, you can get these "tokens" at a 1-2% discount, depending on what credit card you have.

Place your orders here.  (And no, I don't get a percentage.  You'll notice I don't even have a tip jar.)

mundane things that matter: abolish US$1 bills!

If the Obama administration wanted to strike a dramatic blow for public transit, one that would immediate speed up transit journeys all across America, they would abolish the $1 bill, and get everyone used to the $1 coin. 

Travelling in the US last month, I had several opportunities to feed dollar bills into fareboxes. Even if you have perfectly flattened your dollar bill, and folded out all its corners, the process takes at least three seconds per bill, and often closer to five, during which a bus or streetcar with a 100+ passengers goes nowhere. 

 Even with off-board fare collection, dollar bills are a major nuisance for both passengers and transit agencies. In San Francisco, you can't put them directly in the fare gates of the MTA Metro subway. You have to go to a BART ticket machine, find the special green button to change $1 into quarters, then take the quarters an put them in fare gates. In stations not shared with BART, MTA has its own machines that simply exchange a dollar bill for a dollar coin, which the faregates will accept.  (The coin is US legal tender, but so unusual that it might as well be a specialized transit token.)  

But it's on-board fare collection where dollar bills cause serious delay. 

Has anyone done a comparative study of typical bus operations in the US compared to Canada, actually timing the individual act of fare payment? My own informal observations suggest that it's impossible to pay a $2 fare with dollar bills in less than about 7 seconds, while in Canada a $2 coin takes less than one second to register in a farebox.  (Australia and New Zealand also have coins for values below $5, but their boarding delay is more related to the slow manual process of making change for passengers, a practice almost unknown in North America.)

Has someone done a study of the aggregate savings, in running time and maintenance, that would be realized at once if $1 were a coin?

More here on how you can help.