TransLinked

SF's Clipper: a cautionary tale for TransLink?

As an early adopter of the Bay Area’s transit fare system, Clipper (formerly TransLink), I am familiar with its flaws. My least favorite is being questioned by overzealous transit cops when a Clipper card reader fails to read my card.

This morning, one of the card readers on my train informed…

Having had the chance to try out the Clipper when I visited San Francisco last month, I can attest that some things about its implementation really leave a lot to be desired when I compare it to, say, the experience I had with Hong Kong’s Octopus card back even in 2004. For one thing, it’s completely unfathomable to me that there isn’t a machine outside the gates of every station through which I can check what the value on the card is. It’s also a little nuts to me that I can’t add value to it at all stations. If I hadn’t been a tourist carrying cash with me all the time, I might’ve actually been stuck once or twice.

The funniest thing? When I actually did run out of value on the card, the machine had no way of actually telling me this. I asked for help from a station attendant. And it took them another 3 or 4 minutes (and several additional repeated attempts to enter) before they could even pinpoint insufficient funds as the reason I couldn’t enter! Having worked in technical support, I can say with some confidence that if the people providing support don’t have the right tools or skills to diagnose any issue from the spectrum of obvious to obscure, customer satisfaction is going to take a tumble.

There were a couple of other incidents that were not related to the Clipper and somewhat but not entirely my fault (mistaking a MUNI entrance for the BART, as an example), but even more important than just talking trash about Clipper, is the question of whether the Smart Card implementation here in Vancouver will suffer the same flaws. Our transit system, regrettably, doesn’t have a great track record on the design end of things: if the design of its experience and user interaction stripped as far back down to the bone as the Canada Line stations were, this story about the Clipper may soon be a story about TransLink (in Vancouver, where the regional transit authority is called what SF’s smart card used to be called).

Comments