In The Netherlands, the transit card create a great deal of budget. By having a digital card that you need to top up. You end up with money on a card that isn't used. Thus the transit company suddenly has €20-€50 extra cash available per train user. The intrest even generates pretty good money I can imagine
I don't know about the US but in my country manual agricultural labor pays so much only immigrants living in hay barns can afford to do the work. for everyone else it doesn't pay enough to do the work
while true, this doesn't tell you the whole story. insurance, taxes and pension are calculated way differently from the US. Also prices for those 3 are way different.
As a UX designer finding out what users want is a large part of my job. Firstly you look at your own goal; let say you are tasked to build an app for commuters who travel by car everyday. The client is a navigation company.
First you identify who your target audience is, your client might know some about this but it's important to also talk to other related people. So you start to talk to commuters, but also moms who bring their kids to school, traffic cops, people at highway stops, anyone. At the beginning you talk about their experiences, what do they do and why?
Then you want to formulate insights from these interviews and what you have learned from research, for example: Commuters get annoyed by loud noises and honking while standing in a traffic jam.
Then you could ask people who you talked to previously to come in and help design something. (this is also a good moment to ask more questions of you have those) Do a session about people drawing their experiences on a white board and brainstorming together with you and other participants in how this might be solved.
Then you build a MVP and test this with your commuters
Then you improve and iterate and test this again.
If the vibes are good you continue to develop your product.
(this is in short how it works, if you'd like to learn more and get specific tools and techniques tech out this: http://www.designkit.org)