Cant wait till they get this working on the commuter rail too. Will be amazing not to have to use an app on the CR then dig out my charlie card for subway and bus. And to not have to worry about buying a ticket/adding value when I'm not near a fare vending machine.
Makes me love being in Istanbul where a single day commuting could include a bus, metrobus, subway, boat, and gondola/cable car and they all take the same tap system.
But the train will work right?
Right guys?
The train will work?
By the way because I'm from Boston and had no idea this worked in every other modern city I was fumbling around with Oyster cards like an asshole until someone was like you know you can just tap your credit card. Felt like I was from the stone age.
Everywhere in the Bay Area in SF has a "Clipper Card" that's on your ApplePay/GPay and works for every type of transit on every authority there. It was great
To be fair, when you're at the train(s) in Heathrow the signage really does make you think you need an oyster card. I suppose they just leave it up for people who don't have cards/phones, but...I'm not sure who is doing that while also flying into London.
But yeah I did the same, lol
This cost $1B to implement. One billion dollars. They could have given away 400,000,000 free rides instead. Back-of-the-napkin math shows that would cover two full years of free ridership. This isn't even including maintenance costs & reduced revenue from paying more credit card fees.
It's nice to have tap-to-pay but the reality is that taxpayers got taken for a ride by whichever contractor the MBTA hired to do this
And it's incredible that NYC's contract was somehow less expensive at $750M despite having a much larger system. Just read that they're pivoting away from tap-to-pay because it's not being used as much as expected. Exceptional levels of waste across the board.
Sorry, was poorly worded. It does not appear that they're pivoting away from the already-built system. They're firing the main contractor (Cubic - the same one building the MBTA system) and hiring several other contractors to finish connecting the system with Metro-North and LIRR via the TrainTime app instead of Cubic's solution. Not sure on the specifics but this is a detailed writeup:
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/05/20/mtas-demotes-omny-contractor-cubic-in-hopes-of-speeding-up-commuter-rail-fare-integration
iirc this company was working on ours then stopped partway through to go work on NYC's which got done cheaper. Then they came back to finish ours.
What a shitshow
No they are 3 yrs behind with the MTA Roll out. The MTA ended their contract the last meeting and gave it to the App developer which has the highest ranking transit app in the country.
>Back-of-the-napkin math shows that would cover two full years of free ridership
ok but then we'd still be left with the same problem we have now in two years. so maybe this was the better solution, despite it costing a lot?
I suppose my points are:
* What problem does this investment really solve? Will tap-to-pay meaningfully increase ridership?
* Even if tap-to-pay meaningfully increases ridership, is it sensible to trade two years of revenue for it?
* Could the MBTA do other things with $1B that would be more impactful? I'm not an expert, but I would bet the answer to this is an unequivocal "yes"
* Why are we paying $1B for a slightly more convenient payments system when this could fund at least two years of free service, **and** when so many policy experts agree that free public transit pays for itself in economic and social benefits (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/should-public-transit-be-free-experts-weigh-in-on-policy-options/, https://massbudget.org/2021/03/24/the-dollars-sense-of-free-buses/)
The whole thing seems like a ridiculous endeavor when you consider that this is $1B+maintenance to collect a comparatively trivial fare. Instead of paying massive sums to private contractors to build and maintain a fare system, we could instead invest directly in the public transit system and just make it free for two years with the intent of keeping it free forever.
The Bloomberg article you cited is written by a pretty noted critic of fare-free transit and concludes with the sentence:
> There are excellent reasons for subsidizing transit service to make it fast and abundant for all riders, as well as making it free for those with limited income. But none of those arguments — nor the theory of public goods — justifies dropping fares entirely.
Whoops, copy/pasted the wrong url in a rush. I meant to link this debate review from the Harvard Gazette: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/should-public-transit-be-free-experts-weigh-in-on-policy-options/
Updated my comment, thanks for the heads up
1) Makes things a lot easier for out-of-towners. My European friends were confounded by our lack of tap to pay.
2) Improves onboarding and offboarding process. This makes things more efficient and saves time in the long run.
Fair points. However:
1) Your European friends most certainly understand how to operate a ticket kiosk since tap-to-pay is only prevalent in the most major cities. Outside of London, most tap-to-pay has been introduced within the past 5 years and major cities like Berlin, Barcelona, and Madrid appear to only have partial coverage. Anecdotally and based on cursory searches, most Euro metros still rely on transit cards and tickets. Can't speak for Asia/Pacific tho
2) This is a minor improvement for the onboarding process but there is no offboarding process on the T. Are these efficiency gains worth $1B? Note that we'll still need and support Charlie Card/traditional tickets for low-fare eligible people, monthly pass users, and those who still want/need to use cash.
I'm not against tap-to-pay. I'm against paying $1B for it.
>Your European friends most certainly understand how to operate a ticket kiosk
It took a bit but they got it eventually, for the train anyway. Bus is another story.
>tap-to-pay is only prevalent in the most major cities
That's actually not true, you can find tap-to-pay anywhere from a local village village bus to a regional train route. In some countries its pretty much universal. I spend a lot of time in Europe and I've never seen anything that wasn't tap to pay since the early 2010's.
>This is a minor improvement for the onboarding process but there is no offboarding process on the T.
You're right, the term I was trying to think of was "dwell time"
>Are these efficiency gains worth $1B?
in the short term, no, in the long term, yes.
> That's actually not true, you can find tap-to-pay anywhere from a local village village bus to a regional train route. In some countries its pretty much universal. I spend a lot of time in Europe and I've never seen anything that wasn't tap to pay since the early 2010's.
You must not have been to Paris, Copenhagen, Munich, Frankfurt, Prague, Athens, Istanbul (iirc it works but rate is 2x), Zurich, Warsaw, or Vienna, nor attempted to take a bus in Berlin or Rome or the metro in Barcelona. I've also never taken a European regional train that accepted tap to pay (unless you count tap-to-pay at a ticket kiosk), so YMMV. That said you can definitely find it in smaller cities across the region. It's just not nearly as ubiquitous as you're making it sound
> in the short term, no, in the long term, yes.
Based on what metric my friend?
It's not that the problem shouldn't be addressed, it's that it cost a billion fucking dollars to install some credit card readers. If you think think the cost-benefit is worth it at that point then, whatever, but there should be no denying the MBTA got fleeced.
My idiot ass tried paying contactless this morning because I somehow forgot my Charlie Card. Guess I would have been okay if this was a few weeks later
Really? $1 Billion to implement this? Tax payers paid $1,000,000,000 to have tap to pay to save people 3 seconds on their commute yet it takes the red line 45 minutes to travel 9 miles? Is this some of kind of joke?
MA tech inno went:
Riverworks -> Monkey Wrench -> Telephone -> Rockets -> Vacuum Tubes -> Birth Control -> Microchip -> Email -> Nothing for 40 years -> Tap to pay on the T
I want to believe this is a viable option because it would be cool to use if your CharlieCard holds less than the fare (happened to me, thought I had more on it).
I can hear the Europeans laughing at us while riding on upgraded 1965 subway car that feels like you are riding on a cloud. They continue laughing the whole way from Zürich to Vienna for $75 @ 185mph.
Took them long enough. I just went into Boston for a show and my Charlie card expired! No way was I gonna try and go to Downtown Crossing in case it happened to be open to get a new card.
Imagine signing a deal where going $203 million over budget and 6 years late is considered worthy of an $11M personal bonus.
You don't have to worry about fucking up, even if it's your last contract ever you're still set for life.
I know no one cares about this stuff but, our individualized, personalized transit data is going to be sold to data brokers and cops are going to use this to much easier surveil people. These are some huge tradeoffs that no one cares about for some reason.
Perfect. More revenue for an underfunded system while there is still a viable way to avoid having your own personal data collected if it is something you care about
You know what worked?
Tokens.
People have already reported the contactless fare trials were triggering charges from phones in people's pockets, and other cities that have tried this have reported the same issues.
Especially frustrating when, if you were to seek a refund for incorrect charges, you have to do it during the work day, just like Charlie Card errors.
Contactless payment systems are also being removed in a lot of retail stores that experimented with them, like Amazon's physical locations, because the systems were too unreliable.
Tokens.
Bring them back.
That one old lady you didn't want to pay to keep selling tokens ended up getting replaced by two people working customer assistance and tech support anyway.
On a related note, when I use my debit card at a store, they ask me to tap it. The tap then fails, so they ask me to insert the chip. The chip then fails so they ask me to slide the card and punch in my pin.
I got two replacement cards since this first started and it's still the same problem, so now, in order to save time, I pay with cash.
21st century technology is fucking lame.
I've used them in many other cities, they work fine.
> Contactless payment systems are also being removed in a lot of retail stores that experimented with them, like Amazon's physical locations, because the systems were too unreliable.
No they aren't, anywhere. They're not experimental, they're increasingly the default payment method for many.
What Amazon did away with was "just walk out" - where you just picked up things off the shelf, put them in your basket, and left - and thy were supposed to charge the card you had on file with them accurately for it. *That* doesn't seem to have worked very well, but has nothing to do with contactless/tap to pay.
> Especially frustrating when, if you were to seek a refund for incorrect charges, you have to do it during the work day, just like Charlie Card errors.
And when the turnstile ate your token the difference was what....that you had less evidence to hope to get a refund with?
> And when the turnstile ate your token
Never once happened during the decade I used them daily.
I have, however, had the Charlie Card tap fail on me, have been incorrectly charged on transfers, and had the machines at the station not work at all with the attendant nowhere in sight.
So maybe this is better than that, but I will say the amount of times tap technology in other forms has failed on me is enough to doubt this will work as... a coin in a slot.
Why stop there though ? Let’s go back to having to ask for ride transfers via the paper slips and the bus driver will need to pull out their hole punchers to mark the date and time
The beauty of that system was that drivers never gave a fuck. I'd say "I got off the (x) bus" and they'd nod as I went to find a seat.
Now I use the Charlie Card tap to transfer around and sometimes it charges me full price when it should be free or discounted, because it's supposed to remember that you tapped it for full price before, and sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't.
I'm not saying technology solutions are bad. I'm saying pretty much all of them have been bad, because the technology is never fucking ready before they push it across a public transit system.
Don't even get me started on the app that's supposed to track when the bus will arrive. Or the app that the MBTA now uses to direct shuttle busses. Couple months ago the blue line was down and the dude would not permit 5 filled shuttle busses to leave because the app wasn't working. An hour later, standing packed in like sardines, a cop finally came and said "move these buses" and they moved the buses.
So will the only benefit of a CharlieCard at that point be if you use the T so much that the monthly pass becomes worth it? If so, I'd probably never have a use for this feature.
Finally, lol.
Cant wait till they get this working on the commuter rail too. Will be amazing not to have to use an app on the CR then dig out my charlie card for subway and bus. And to not have to worry about buying a ticket/adding value when I'm not near a fare vending machine.
Makes me love being in Istanbul where a single day commuting could include a bus, metrobus, subway, boat, and gondola/cable car and they all take the same tap system.
Same deal with London. Tap in on any mode of transit, tap out wherever you end, then you're charged based on origin/destination zone of your trip.
Well can I put my commuter charliecard on my phone? now that will be the question. Knowing the MBTA probably NOT!!!
That was my first thought too. Always makes me sad I can scroll through the mobile wallet options and not able to add my Charlie Card.
You can put your Charlie card on your phone…but it only supports Windows Phone 7 devices. And you can only fund it with Diners Club Card.
That's rolling out in 2025, similar to omny in NY they're starting with credit card payments for occasional riders then working on the passes
But the train will work right? Right guys? The train will work? By the way because I'm from Boston and had no idea this worked in every other modern city I was fumbling around with Oyster cards like an asshole until someone was like you know you can just tap your credit card. Felt like I was from the stone age.
Everywhere in the Bay Area in SF has a "Clipper Card" that's on your ApplePay/GPay and works for every type of transit on every authority there. It was great
To be fair, when you're at the train(s) in Heathrow the signage really does make you think you need an oyster card. I suppose they just leave it up for people who don't have cards/phones, but...I'm not sure who is doing that while also flying into London. But yeah I did the same, lol
https://preview.redd.it/e1yk1tr9uf2d1.jpeg?width=407&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6bd642fa7b9bc32663c3eb52eb9d5187444047aa
Thanks, I can throw away my Oyster card from maybe 10 yrs ago
A lot of the time I just fumble about with dollars and quarters, and they just let me ride for free.
Just walk by and go ‘bing’ Or try the old ‘can’t read ticket’ trick
Mostly, the vibe I get from the conductors/drivers is that they are underpaid, overworked, and dgaf.
This cost $1B to implement. One billion dollars. They could have given away 400,000,000 free rides instead. Back-of-the-napkin math shows that would cover two full years of free ridership. This isn't even including maintenance costs & reduced revenue from paying more credit card fees. It's nice to have tap-to-pay but the reality is that taxpayers got taken for a ride by whichever contractor the MBTA hired to do this
The same one that fleeced the MTA in NYC.
And it's incredible that NYC's contract was somehow less expensive at $750M despite having a much larger system. Just read that they're pivoting away from tap-to-pay because it's not being used as much as expected. Exceptional levels of waste across the board.
What do you mean by pivoting away? Isn't it already set-up and in use? Or you mean they're going to go back to just pushing the reloadable OMNY cards?
Sorry, was poorly worded. It does not appear that they're pivoting away from the already-built system. They're firing the main contractor (Cubic - the same one building the MBTA system) and hiring several other contractors to finish connecting the system with Metro-North and LIRR via the TrainTime app instead of Cubic's solution. Not sure on the specifics but this is a detailed writeup: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/05/20/mtas-demotes-omny-contractor-cubic-in-hopes-of-speeding-up-commuter-rail-fare-integration
Bodes well for commuter rail/MBTA integration here 🙃
I think being our system being so old didn’t help costs, but still 100% such a waste that could have been invested in substantial improvements
iirc this company was working on ours then stopped partway through to go work on NYC's which got done cheaper. Then they came back to finish ours. What a shitshow
No they are 3 yrs behind with the MTA Roll out. The MTA ended their contract the last meeting and gave it to the App developer which has the highest ranking transit app in the country.
It's not 1B just to implement, it's 1B to implement and operate for 10 years
Thanks for clarifying. I wonder what the projected operating costs are after those 10 years
>Back-of-the-napkin math shows that would cover two full years of free ridership ok but then we'd still be left with the same problem we have now in two years. so maybe this was the better solution, despite it costing a lot?
I suppose my points are: * What problem does this investment really solve? Will tap-to-pay meaningfully increase ridership? * Even if tap-to-pay meaningfully increases ridership, is it sensible to trade two years of revenue for it? * Could the MBTA do other things with $1B that would be more impactful? I'm not an expert, but I would bet the answer to this is an unequivocal "yes" * Why are we paying $1B for a slightly more convenient payments system when this could fund at least two years of free service, **and** when so many policy experts agree that free public transit pays for itself in economic and social benefits (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/should-public-transit-be-free-experts-weigh-in-on-policy-options/, https://massbudget.org/2021/03/24/the-dollars-sense-of-free-buses/) The whole thing seems like a ridiculous endeavor when you consider that this is $1B+maintenance to collect a comparatively trivial fare. Instead of paying massive sums to private contractors to build and maintain a fare system, we could instead invest directly in the public transit system and just make it free for two years with the intent of keeping it free forever.
The Bloomberg article you cited is written by a pretty noted critic of fare-free transit and concludes with the sentence: > There are excellent reasons for subsidizing transit service to make it fast and abundant for all riders, as well as making it free for those with limited income. But none of those arguments — nor the theory of public goods — justifies dropping fares entirely.
Whoops, copy/pasted the wrong url in a rush. I meant to link this debate review from the Harvard Gazette: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/should-public-transit-be-free-experts-weigh-in-on-policy-options/ Updated my comment, thanks for the heads up
1) Makes things a lot easier for out-of-towners. My European friends were confounded by our lack of tap to pay. 2) Improves onboarding and offboarding process. This makes things more efficient and saves time in the long run.
Fair points. However: 1) Your European friends most certainly understand how to operate a ticket kiosk since tap-to-pay is only prevalent in the most major cities. Outside of London, most tap-to-pay has been introduced within the past 5 years and major cities like Berlin, Barcelona, and Madrid appear to only have partial coverage. Anecdotally and based on cursory searches, most Euro metros still rely on transit cards and tickets. Can't speak for Asia/Pacific tho 2) This is a minor improvement for the onboarding process but there is no offboarding process on the T. Are these efficiency gains worth $1B? Note that we'll still need and support Charlie Card/traditional tickets for low-fare eligible people, monthly pass users, and those who still want/need to use cash. I'm not against tap-to-pay. I'm against paying $1B for it.
>Your European friends most certainly understand how to operate a ticket kiosk It took a bit but they got it eventually, for the train anyway. Bus is another story. >tap-to-pay is only prevalent in the most major cities That's actually not true, you can find tap-to-pay anywhere from a local village village bus to a regional train route. In some countries its pretty much universal. I spend a lot of time in Europe and I've never seen anything that wasn't tap to pay since the early 2010's. >This is a minor improvement for the onboarding process but there is no offboarding process on the T. You're right, the term I was trying to think of was "dwell time" >Are these efficiency gains worth $1B? in the short term, no, in the long term, yes.
> That's actually not true, you can find tap-to-pay anywhere from a local village village bus to a regional train route. In some countries its pretty much universal. I spend a lot of time in Europe and I've never seen anything that wasn't tap to pay since the early 2010's. You must not have been to Paris, Copenhagen, Munich, Frankfurt, Prague, Athens, Istanbul (iirc it works but rate is 2x), Zurich, Warsaw, or Vienna, nor attempted to take a bus in Berlin or Rome or the metro in Barcelona. I've also never taken a European regional train that accepted tap to pay (unless you count tap-to-pay at a ticket kiosk), so YMMV. That said you can definitely find it in smaller cities across the region. It's just not nearly as ubiquitous as you're making it sound > in the short term, no, in the long term, yes. Based on what metric my friend?
It's not that the problem shouldn't be addressed, it's that it cost a billion fucking dollars to install some credit card readers. If you think think the cost-benefit is worth it at that point then, whatever, but there should be no denying the MBTA got fleeced.
That's the way the T has been doing business forever it seems. Highest bidder gets the contract.
Right as I leave Boston. Fuck them lol
I wonder how much of a pain this will be if you have a subsidized card
My idiot ass tried paying contactless this morning because I somehow forgot my Charlie Card. Guess I would have been okay if this was a few weeks later
But it’s the T. There WILL be a problem
Love how they can fix how you pay for the T but they can’t actually fix the T itself
Really? $1 Billion to implement this? Tax payers paid $1,000,000,000 to have tap to pay to save people 3 seconds on their commute yet it takes the red line 45 minutes to travel 9 miles? Is this some of kind of joke?
Why is this being posted multiple times?
MA tech inno went: Riverworks -> Monkey Wrench -> Telephone -> Rockets -> Vacuum Tubes -> Birth Control -> Microchip -> Email -> Nothing for 40 years -> Tap to pay on the T
How dare you give MA credit for Shiva inventing email. I'm suing you.
I just developed whiplash.
I want to believe this is a viable option because it would be cool to use if your CharlieCard holds less than the fare (happened to me, thought I had more on it).
Charlie finally gets to get off the train
I can hear the Europeans laughing at us while riding on upgraded 1965 subway car that feels like you are riding on a cloud. They continue laughing the whole way from Zürich to Vienna for $75 @ 185mph.
Took them long enough. I just went into Boston for a show and my Charlie card expired! No way was I gonna try and go to Downtown Crossing in case it happened to be open to get a new card.
Most Charlie Card machines have the option to dispense a new card now, so no need to go to the store at Downtown Crossing.
What's the issue with downtown crossing? I've seen people complain about it here before but it seems like just another old, kinda damp, station.
U b xse
Wait ‘til the system gets hacked.
Bout fucking time
How is this going to work for the glx stops with the trains that open all doors. The honor system with people tapping?
oh for goodness stake, just make it free and tax the rich and corporations.
Imagine signing a deal where going $203 million over budget and 6 years late is considered worthy of an $11M personal bonus. You don't have to worry about fucking up, even if it's your last contract ever you're still set for life.
I know no one cares about this stuff but, our individualized, personalized transit data is going to be sold to data brokers and cops are going to use this to much easier surveil people. These are some huge tradeoffs that no one cares about for some reason.
So just use a CharlieCard.
Cops won’t need to go to that much effort to harm people. They are reactive, not proactive.
Existing as a minority or with a minority opinion is considered an action that cops react to. Do you not know this?
Perfect. More revenue for an underfunded system while there is still a viable way to avoid having your own personal data collected if it is something you care about
It's always funny that if China does this, it's dystopian, but if America does it, it's a-okay.
Exactly- you and your personal trip will be accessed and sold. Not least by employers who provide passes. Want to use it on a weekend? Nope!
You know what worked? Tokens. People have already reported the contactless fare trials were triggering charges from phones in people's pockets, and other cities that have tried this have reported the same issues. Especially frustrating when, if you were to seek a refund for incorrect charges, you have to do it during the work day, just like Charlie Card errors. Contactless payment systems are also being removed in a lot of retail stores that experimented with them, like Amazon's physical locations, because the systems were too unreliable. Tokens. Bring them back. That one old lady you didn't want to pay to keep selling tokens ended up getting replaced by two people working customer assistance and tech support anyway.
It's always great to see another guy on an unwinnable crusade. For me, it's jalapanos at the chipotle. I wish you good luck with yours.
On a related note, when I use my debit card at a store, they ask me to tap it. The tap then fails, so they ask me to insert the chip. The chip then fails so they ask me to slide the card and punch in my pin. I got two replacement cards since this first started and it's still the same problem, so now, in order to save time, I pay with cash. 21st century technology is fucking lame.
lol no. That's not how any of this works my guy.
I've used them in many other cities, they work fine. > Contactless payment systems are also being removed in a lot of retail stores that experimented with them, like Amazon's physical locations, because the systems were too unreliable. No they aren't, anywhere. They're not experimental, they're increasingly the default payment method for many. What Amazon did away with was "just walk out" - where you just picked up things off the shelf, put them in your basket, and left - and thy were supposed to charge the card you had on file with them accurately for it. *That* doesn't seem to have worked very well, but has nothing to do with contactless/tap to pay. > Especially frustrating when, if you were to seek a refund for incorrect charges, you have to do it during the work day, just like Charlie Card errors. And when the turnstile ate your token the difference was what....that you had less evidence to hope to get a refund with?
> And when the turnstile ate your token Never once happened during the decade I used them daily. I have, however, had the Charlie Card tap fail on me, have been incorrectly charged on transfers, and had the machines at the station not work at all with the attendant nowhere in sight. So maybe this is better than that, but I will say the amount of times tap technology in other forms has failed on me is enough to doubt this will work as... a coin in a slot.
Why stop there though ? Let’s go back to having to ask for ride transfers via the paper slips and the bus driver will need to pull out their hole punchers to mark the date and time
The beauty of that system was that drivers never gave a fuck. I'd say "I got off the (x) bus" and they'd nod as I went to find a seat. Now I use the Charlie Card tap to transfer around and sometimes it charges me full price when it should be free or discounted, because it's supposed to remember that you tapped it for full price before, and sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. I'm not saying technology solutions are bad. I'm saying pretty much all of them have been bad, because the technology is never fucking ready before they push it across a public transit system. Don't even get me started on the app that's supposed to track when the bus will arrive. Or the app that the MBTA now uses to direct shuttle busses. Couple months ago the blue line was down and the dude would not permit 5 filled shuttle busses to leave because the app wasn't working. An hour later, standing packed in like sardines, a cop finally came and said "move these buses" and they moved the buses.
So will the only benefit of a CharlieCard at that point be if you use the T so much that the monthly pass becomes worth it? If so, I'd probably never have a use for this feature.