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.
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