A self-styled consumer advocate claims here that “the non-transferrability rule for tickets is bogus … it has absolutely nothing to do with security and everything to do with money.” He says this on account of somebody who was able to get a name changed on a ticket after paying $800 in fees. The best you can do? No, because in this amazing comment below:

Krys
$800?? Wow. Here is what I did and it only cost me about $60.
I had similar problem. The ticket was in my name and i bought it in June 08 for the trip to Poland in December. In July, my grandmother died. Since we did not have a lot of money I decided to give my ticket to my dad. I ran into the same problems trying to change name on the ticket. After whole week of trying I gave up. I looked into changing my dad’s legal name. And there it was. A process that took about 1 week, $60 in cash, 15 minutes in front of judge and we had my dad’s first name changed to mine. I was honest with the judge as to why he wanted to change his first name (my dad doesnt speak english). Once we got the approval, we went to secretary of state to get him new license, once we got that we got him new green card (took 2 months) and there he went. He now changed his name back for another $60.

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… and wallet distributions.

This is part of the Toronto visit series.

“Do you have change for $5?”
“I can only give you one loonie and two lizes”
“What?”
Dumps coins on counter.
“Oh…”

(Canada has no bills under $5 and circulates the $1 and $2 coins.)

Before playing with Canadian money, I had thought that a $2 denomination, whether coin or bill, would be a great idea. But the problem I encountered here was that I was just unable to get very many $1 coins when the $2 coin was also widely circulating. This makes sense, because each transaction at most ends up giving you one additional $1 coin if done optimally. But if you had to always pay odd dollar-amount fees like the $3 streetcar fares, then you need many $1 coins which you don’t have. Compare this to the US system, where you get lots of $1 bills from daily transactions — up to four $1 bills in a transaction ($0-$4 in change). It surprised me that the latter situation is more flexible, because I did not take into account the dynamic effects that repeated transactions have.
(Read the article)

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