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Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards
New submitter johnslater writes "The Chicago Transit Authority's new 'Ventra' stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million."
Why are all cities moving from easy-to-use tokens to these expensive, complicated systems?
Cities move away from tokens to fare cards so they can charge variable rates based on supply and demand. During peak usage, they can make the fee higher and during times of lower ridership, fares can be made cheaper to encourage more ridership. Also general rate hikes cannot be done as quickly with tokens because people can buy a mass of tokens just before the rate hike yet still ride with their pre-hike token after the hike goes into effect.
The reason that everybody is trying to move to this type of things is the success of the London oyster card system. Not perfect, but good enough, and is widely adopted.
The key with the London system was the transit fare system was very well integrated to start with. If you bought a zone 1-4 weekly pass, you could take buses tube and trains everywhere within zone 1-4.
The trick to getting adoption was the cash "penalty" fare. For instance a cash bus fare is nearly twice the price of an oyster card fare. And if you buy a season ticket it gets loaded onto an oyster card. So anybody in London needs an oyster card, and so has one.
The other effective thing that was done was to only have oyster top up and ticket sales at stations and offered exclusively to local independent corner stores. The advantage to the store holder is 2 fold, it gave a small financial return to the store owner, but more importantly for the store owner it got people in the store. Topping up oyster cards and at the same time getting a drink or chocolate bar etc. So very quickly every store had one, and in London there are a lot of them so it was widely accessible with very little staffing costs.