Despite Jay Walder’s looming departure from the MTA in six weeks, the MTA is still moving ahead with a variety of technological innovations. Staten Island will soon have real-time tracking throughout its entire bus system, and the MetroCard replacement project will slog forward toward a mid-decade completion date. While that project has more uncertainty surrounding it in the face of Walder’s departure, the authority appears committed to finding a newer fare payment system than the MetroCard.
New York isn’t alone in that regard. Across the world, cities and transit agencies of all stripes are moving forward with various plans to unify fare payment sometimes. Some are looking at charge card-based technology as the MTA is and others are examining tried-and-true smart card-based solutions run by the usual private players in the fare media field. Not every effort is going smoothly.
Recently, San Francisco unveiled the Clipper card, a payment system designed to unify the Bay Area’s seven different transit agencies. As Scott James of The Bay Citizen detailed for The Times, the new system is suffering through some growing pains. As James details, San Francisco commuters have taken to Twitter and other social media outlets to voice their complaints over the new service, and while BART, Caltrain and SF MUNI downplay the problems, they are indeed out there.
James writes:
Clipper, named for the high-speed 19th-century ships that revolutionized sea travel, is hitting a few head winds, including system failures and overcharging customers. The service began in June 2010 — the first one-card-serves-all solution for the region’s fragmented transit system — simplifying access and payment to regional trains, buses, subway lines, streetcars and ferries, all with varying fare systems.
In some ways it has been remarkably successful…But it has proved difficult to eliminate all the glitches. And some expected improvements, like increasing Muni efficiency, have failed to materialize. Clipper was built and is operated by Cubic, a San Diego military contractor and transportation company. To date, the system has cost $140 million, with another $17.6 million expected in the 2011-12 fiscal year…
Although Cubic officials declined to be interviewed, e-mail sent by the company said there were 38,000 calls to its customer service hot line in August. “The fact that 99.7 percent of transactions did not require interaction with Cubic customer service representatives suggests a successful system,” Matt Newsome, a Cubic vice president, said in a statement.
But that math obscures the truth: transactions (500,000 daily, 14 million monthly) do not equal passengers. Each leg of a journey counts as a transaction. A weekday round-trip BART to Muni transfer, for example, counts as four transactions a day (two BART transactions, two Muni transactions), 84 a month. Officials said it was too difficult to determine how many passengers regularly used the card, but it is clear that far more than 0.3 percent of passengers are complaining.
Cubic, no stranger to unfavorable press, has always been a major player in the fare payment field, and theirs is is a name familiar to us on the East Coast. They have supplied the MTA with its MetroCard system, and the ever-increasing maintenance costs, I am told, is one of the drivers behind the push for an open fare payment system. That they are encountering problems or “growing pains” in San Francisco is not much of a surprise.
Now, the MTA is in a situation where they can get something right. They can see how other transit agencies adopt to this new technology, and they can see which companies provide good service and which do not. They could compile some best practices as they identify potential MetroCard replacements, and they can usher in a technology that is both forward-looking and flexible. It’s a tall order for an agency that has struggled to adopt an old system to new technologies, but the other outcome — more pain from closed systems — seems less desirable all the time. Just ask San Francisco.
36 comments
So if Cubic is apparently so incompetent, and their tech so flaky, why do they get all these contracts…?
Because they’re a US-based defense contractor, i.e. they have tons of lobbying contacts and know the system inside and out. In contrast, Sony and NXP are foreign electronics companies and have more expertise in making useful products than in extracting rent from American governments.
You’re missing one of the biggest problems with Clipper: it doesn’t integrate the fares, just the fare payment medium. If you need to transfer across agencies, as is very common in the Bay Area, you need to pay multiple fares.
That is more a flaw of regional policy than it is a problem with Clipper.
i used the Octopus in Hong Kong. no problem.
Clipper in my home country? disaster. makes no sense. doesn’t work. no way to tell your balance. the web-based login page is from 1993.
really unbelievable. it makes sense, now that i hear they’re military contractors. makes sense to outsource a technology solution from the technology capital of the world to…san diego.
smart!
Akit’s Complaint Box has a good reply to that Bay Citizen article: http://www.akit.org/2011/09/co.....-anti.html
I’ve personally been very happy with Clipper, primarily riding BART, but occassionally AC Transit and Muni, but as Alon points out, its biggest limitation is that it lets you ride all the services in the Bay Area, but you end up paying way too much to do so. There are some discount schemes, but they are pretty stupid. (for instance, you get 25 cents off an AC transit ride when transferring FROM bart, but not TO bart….)
I wonder to what degree this problem could be worked on in New York as well. The commuter rail is expensive as hell there as it is (even with the monthlies, LIRR at least is way more than BART), to have to take the Subway with it would be quite expensive.
I think a standard would be great. Id love a fare card I could use anywhere I traveled, etc.
The transfer fares aren’t really Cubic’s fault, though. They don’t set the fares, they just implement collection. The software does support transfer fares as BBnet3000 points out in the AC Transit case.
Perhaps it would be in Cubic’s interests to go around lobbying the agencies to change their fare structure, but it’s ultimately not their job. The real problem is having seven different companies not playing nicely together.
In both cases, it’s the fault of poor Bay Area governance. A good government would’ve cut Cubic out ten years ago and switched to an established vendor with a good track record, of which there were several even then. It would’ve also prioritized fare integration over fare payment integration.
I’ve only had good experiences with the WMATA Smartrip card in Washington. Their website is good, and it’s easy to reload. It doesn’t do passes though, but I’m not sure if that’s a limitation of the system or if they just didn’t want to do that.
The Seattle metro area has a new farecard system called ORCA & is the only one I know of that wasn’t done by Cubic. Interestingly that Philadelphia’s SEPTA has never used automatic fare colection until now. Like the MTA, SEPTA WILL BE installing an open sourced card system in 2014. In adition WMATA & the CTA are also moving to open sourced cards as well.
The goal is to be able to travel from city to city with a single fare medium valid on all transit systems & there’s no reason why that shouldn’t happen. It would actually cause transit use to rise nationwide since most bariors would in effect vanish.
Example…
With an open system a Clipper Card holder could take there card to Boston & use it as if it were a charlie Card, or Washington DC & it functions just like a Smartrip card.
More to the point, you can just use a credit card to make all those payments, which is what’s likely to predominate. Agencies could eliminate their proprietary media altogether, so far as I can tell.
Correct. That’s part of the open system. You can either use an existing RFID enabled credit/ debit card OR a dedicated transit only card with the same RFID technolodgy. Visa & Mastercard are working together on such a project.
I need to correct myself Portland’s %TTri-Met also doesn’t use farecards either, however they may at some point join ORCA from what I read.
I’m a little lost on what the value of a transit-only card would be given the existing availability of debit cards, credit cards, and anonymous prepaid cards. Why would someone want a card that is transit-only … it would seem to be nothing but a cost center for the transit agencies providing it.
What’s the value? Let’s see… a card that pretty much everyone in the city has. Perfect anonymity, without needing to establish a bank account or pay fees if your balance is too low. Infrastructure that’s easy to install at stores, that only charges 1% fee vs. 3-4% for credit cards, and still turns a profit to the transit agency (in the case I’m channeling, Hong Kong’s MTR). What use could it possibly have?
a little lost on what the value of a transit-only card would be given the existing availability of debit cards, credit cards, and anonymous prepaid cards. Why would someone want a card that is transit-only … it would seem to be nothing but a cost center for the transit agencies providing it.
If your Credit/ debit card isn’t RFID you will need a seperate card. Not everyone is comfortable using those RFID cards for one reason or another & this structure accomadates the greatest number of users. Credit/ debit cards are more durable & longer lasting rhan the current Metrocard.
Who said a transit card has to be transit-only? On the contrary, best practice is to license it as anonymous electronic money. That’s how it’s done in Hong Kong and increasingly Japan. Just because Americans haven’t done it doesn’t mean it’s impossible or new or undesirable.
There’s already cards that pretty much everyone in the city has (I would speculate that Mastercard/Visa/Amex together have higher penetration in NYC than the Metrocard at the moment). These are also available in anonymous reloadable prepaid forms, in retail stores today, and the infrastructure is already widely installed in stores. We can complain about the fees, but it’s a competitive market on both the merchant and consumer sides and people seem to pay them happily enough. Barring obvious anti-competitive practices I don’t find a compelling case that those fees are not, in fact, the market price.
Note that I’m not saying the MTA shouldn’t enter into the branded fare payment card business if in fact it could make money doing so rather than just retailing 3rd party prepaid cards. If it’s more profitable for the MTA to use a proprietary card and not permit interchange network transactions, that’s fine too. I speculate however that the MTA is alike to most other businesses which have found the transition to interchange transactions very profitable.
I don’t agree that it should follow the MTR in levering its transit monopoly into dominance in other industries, like payment technology. This type of bundling is usually bad behavior when private companies undertake it (e.g. Microsoft’s browser bundling anti-trust problems) and just as bad for public-private companies.
Since when does the MTR have a monopoly on transit in Hong Kong?
To clarify: there are a lot of transit operators in Hong Kong (and also in Tokyo, where there are two different but compatible cards) – the MTR is just the one that has a subway and not just buses.
What Visa, MasterCard, et al have is an oligopoly. It could be the market price, but it still involves a lot of profit that isn’t going back to the merchants. It’s the equivalent of oil company profits (or railroad profits back in the day): yes, there may be competition, but it’s still good to give people an alternative.
As for penetration, it depends on class. People from the middle class up all have credit cards. People who are poor or recent immigrants don’t always, and when they do, they get stiffed on interest rates and bank fees.
The other issue is ease of use. In Singapore, the card that was licensed for electronic money first was the CashCard, used for congestion pricing, rather than the transit card, EZLink. It started with using CashCards to pay for parking, since all cars have them and it’s more convenient than scrambling for change, and spread to vending machines and the likes. Although most Singaporeans do not own cars, the ease of obtaining a CashCard (no need to open a bank account or apply for a credit card) made many non-owners get one for electronic money functions.
An open system would still require negotiating an agreement. Japan, where all smartcards use the same technology, has a huge number of bilateral agreements. If the US mandates one standard and cross-compatibility, it’ll do a world of good. Bonus points if it makes it compatible with EBT and Eagle Cash. There’s no need to turn everything into a bonanza for fee-charging credit card companies; anonymous electronic money works fine.
It would be great if turnstile readers also accepted debit and credit cards. If the card is valid, it instantly allows passage with the transaction following. Many big chains do this now since moving more people through is much better compared with the occasional bad card.
Regular monthly users would get a partial refund at the end of the month so it equates to a monthly unlimited pass. It’s silly to still buy tickets when many would prefer an easier option.
Basing fares on distance traveled is counterproductive to getting people to ride transit. This is a bad idea that won’t really change the MTA’s financial problems.
I’m a fan of new technology but this is one project I hope the MTA takes its time on and phases in gradually before pulling the plug on Metrocard. For all its limitations it works well within the confines of the 90’s tech. Before I’m forced to switch to a new fare medium it better be flawless.
Does anyone ever question all this technophilia?
After several generations of electronic fare collection, low-tech proof-of-payment deserves another look. No turnstile purchase and maintenance, no treadmill of software development. Dependable off the shelf vending equipment at stations accepts cash or plastic for tickets or passes. Put all the money saved toward officers performing ticket checks and patrolling the system to enhance and safety and service.
agreed. It’s been all downhill since the days of tokens. These fancy new cards simply enable convoluted fare structures that make the system harder for people to understand.
Wont happen. The reasoning is simple computers don’t require salaries & benefits.
Tokens were the exact opposite of best POP practice. To make POP work well, it’s ideal to offer large unlimited monthly discounts, in order to make sure as many passengers as possible prepay and do not have any incentive to cheat. This allows reducing the number of fare inspectors. In contrast, tokens had no season passes, and every person had to go through fare barriers.
There are obviously situations where POP works well, but despite its popularity amongst transit wonks, POP is not a panacea.
The most obvious drawbacks:
(1) The requirement that one must always carry “proof” of a destination selected in advance, isn’t always convenient for the passenger.
If the system is so small/uncomplicated as to make universal “travel everywhere” passes reasonable for most people, or most people never tend to travel outside a limited area (or only use the system for highly regular activities like commuting), then passes might work for most trips.
However if people often travel over a wide area, and the system is so extensive that an unlimited pass would be unreasonably expensive for many users, passengers are forced to often resort to paper tickets or the like—and in the age of contactless smart cards, this is regressive (I’ve spent enough of my lifetime waiting in TVM lines, thank you very much).
(2) Because of the large penalties required, it severely punishes innocent mistakes—and everybody makes mistakes sometimes (especially with a system like POP where there’s no physical enforcement of boundaries). Of course with POP, there’s only a statisical chance that you’ll get caught, but it’s a very rude shock when it happens!
[Maybe there are technical fixes for such problems, but everytime I bring them up them up in discussion threads, all the POP advocates suddenly stop responding…]
There is a technical fix to problem #1. In Singapore, when you ride a bus, you tap in when you board and out when you disembark. An inspector can verify you’ve tapped in but not out.
Another issue is that when the fare doesn’t depend on distance, or is based on a simple zone structure, people just carry zone passes.
Er, but isn’t that (singapore bus) approach essentially fare gates—i.e., not POP? I agree that fare gates do not have these problems…
A possible approach using POP might be “optional” tap-in/tap-out system for people going outside their pass boundaries, but that also has problems — e.g., there are probably many ways to game such a system, and it seems likely to result in a lot of user error (forgetting to tap in or out), with resulting high penalties.
To follow up, once you start trying to address these issues by adding things like “optional fare gates”/”tap-in-tap-out stations”—which may be needed in great numbers at stations with very high non-commute traffic—the system essentially becomes less the pure and simple POP that’s beloved of transit wonks, and more a weird sort of hybrid.
The problem is that many of the advantages of POP are far less clear with such a system, and at worst, you may end up with most of the disadvantages of both systems! E.g., large amounts of money and space for fare-gates (call them what you will) but also extremely high penalties for innocent mistakes and a system that tends to encourage them!
And a legitimate way to boot out the homeless.
Note that Clipper did *not* start in June 2010. Rather sometime in the late 1990’s. They renamed in in 2010 in a successful attempt to obscure their decade of not making much progress. But the system does work reasonably OK now.
Question: does the bay area have a regional government similar to San diego’s SANDAG or is it seperate county & city governments. If it’s the latter, it may explane a few things.
>bay area have a regional government
No. The Bay Area is a complete disaster when it comes to mass transit.
If you want to see something hilarious, try using http://511.org to go from Mountain View (Google) to SFO airport at noon on a weekday.
You have take Caltrain (like LIRR) to a stop (Millbrae) where you can SEE the frickin’ airport. You then have to switch to BART to go one stop north (San Bruno) and transfer to southbound train to go to SFO. The next stop on that train? Millbrae – you know, where you just were.
Total travel time: usually over 1 hour.
By car? 25.5 miles – 35 minutes in the middle of the day.
Oh, and god forbid you make the mistake of hailing a taxi from SFO->Mountain View. That’ll cost you >$100 + tip.
I can’t believe I actually miss the LIRR.
The BART service from Millbrae to the airport is so terrible that for years the airport ran a free shuttle bus for its employees. A taxi from Millbrae BART to SFO is $10 and takes you right to your terminal in about five minutes. BART ($4/person for the 1/2 mile trip, every 20 minutes) goes to the international terminal where most travelers must transfer to a people mover to get within walking distance of their destination terminal.
The BART airport extension cost $1.5 billion of your dollars.
Apropos of the limitations of too many closed systems, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting relief from those limitations any time soon. Even though the MTA owns and operates both the MetroNorth and LIRR, they’re not likely to become part of an extended NYC Subway system, and offer the commensurate single fare, in our lifetimes. Forget about NJ Transit. The only thing that will make living in the Tri-State area a reasonable proposition in the future will be a more workable regional mass-transit.
After the IND subsumed the BRT/BMT and IRT systems, the opportunities for system consolidation all but vanished. But there is still one major integration step that CAN be taken, and that is to graft the PATH system into the MTA. There are a lot of small – read, “affordable” – projects that can vastly improve the region’s mass-transit, disproportionate to their cost, if the Port Authority can be persuaded to divest itself of their tiny subway.
The abandoned tunnel and bell mouth at Ninth Street can be projected a single stop up to Union Square, giving commuters an effective access to the east side, and seven more trains. The World Trade Center terminus could also extend a single stop to meet the Second Ave subway at Fulton Street.
But the single most important regional advantage would be because it is the shortest, cheapest road toward integrating Staten Island into the subway system. The SIR, like the PATH, runs under modified FRA regulations, so running the PATH trains down to Elizabeth (they already plan to extend to Newark Airport – so we’re only talking about one more stop) would be a cheap and easy expansion. Likewise, the SIR already plans to reopen its northern corridor, which brings it to within spitting distance of a perfectly functional bridge across the Arthur Kill. Moreover, the right-of-way from that bridge to Elizabeth already exists, and is quite viable. Compare that with waiting for the MTA to come up with the money to tunnel across from Brooklyn. Like the 2nd Ave Subway, we’d be looking at a project that’s another couple of generations away – if we’re lucky.
New York City inhabitants in Staten Island would be able to swipe a MetroCard and find themselves in Herald Square in less time than it takes for a Mets fan to get to Citi Field from Coney Island or Van Cortlandt Park.
The MTA could operate it as a “C” division – modified FRA – and open up the regional mass-transit possibilities an order of magnitude. But it all begins with doing away with the PATH system.