With the increasing sophistication of fare collection structures and consequently of fare collection equipment, equipment reliability and cost are becoming increasingly important issues. Techniques have been developed to analyze the interrelationships among reliability, cost, and the ability of a fare collection system to deliver dependable service to passengers. These techniques, based on mainframe computers and an investigation of the steady-state performance of the system, evaluate the performance of a given system, analyze its sensitivity to changes, determine specifications necessary for a given level of performance, and make trade-offs between system parameters. Microcomputers are becoming progressively more powerful, inexpensive, and readily available. So that the analysis techniques can be used more easily by transit personnel and analysts, a fare collection dependability model has been developed to run in a user-interactive microcomputer environment. The model determines the likelihood of equipment failures affecting system operation during a peak period. If equipment failures cause insufficient capacity to adequately process passenger demand, the fare collection system is defined as" in trouble." The likelihood of trouble is called the" trouble rate," whereas the likelihood of adequate capacity is called" peak period dependability." The technical approach for the performance and cost aspects of the model is discussed, both the probabilistic basis and the computational methodology to minimize execution time. The software to enable the user to interactively operate the model is described, and instructions are provided for its use. A sample fare collection dependability analysis session, consisting of four runs, is also provided.