Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Updates on BART Survey for TransLink (Clipper)


Since I have a Mac at home, I didn't notice the additional attachment in the PDF document from the BART Board of Directors meeting agenda for this Thursday. I needed to use an Adobe based PDF reader vs. Mac's "preview" program, and I found more information about the BART survey results, and some extra news about how BART will progress with TransLink/Clipper.

Here's more of what came out of the survey (read the initial results first):
  1. Invitations were sent via e-mail to 5,800 BART riders holding TL cards. The population they picked includes people who transitioned from EZ Rider, ones who enrolled in the high value discount autoload program (TransLink), and others who participated in TransLink.
  2. 45% accepted the invitation to take the survey (2,600 people).
  3. Two most common problems are: "See agent" when tagging card, and "takes too long" (when reading the card).
  4. The new card sensors are working better than the original ones. 35% agreed.
  5. The error rate of tagging the card is 7.8% systemwide.
Translink Cards - Current and Past

More news from BART about Clipper:
  1. There is a claim the new Clipper cards (by DesFire) will be quicker processing.
  2. BART is considering to do a replacement of their small fare gate displays.
  3. EZ Rider will be phased out by December. The parking program which is dependent on EZ Rider will transition to Clipper in November.
  4. The transition for high value tickets and senior/youth tickets is ongoing while they do an evaluation as per policy.
  5. EZ Rider cardholders will be sent an e-mail starting after June 15th to encourage them to transition to Clipper. This will be done in small batches to not overload the folks at both BART (EZ Rider) and Clipper with issuing refunds and new cards.

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousJune 16, 2010 at 1:37 PM

    One note on BART: They seem to* require a $1.75 minimum balance--even though you can go negative, they won't let you on the train for that. Seems odd since they have a $10.85 or so max fare, so $0.85 would make more sense as a minimum balance. (And if possible, only from the two stations which that fare is between.)

    * Note that I encountered this only once, a few months ago. It may have changed since then.

    ReplyDelete

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