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Coming Soon: MUNI/BART to Track Your Every Move
SF Appeal reports that Muni will be replacing all existing fare gates at its underground Metro stations with TransLink-only fare gates (PDF) by fall of 2010, and it's possible Fast Passes will only be available electronically as well.
The 98 new underground fare gates, 40 fare vending machines and 16 new agent control terminals at Embarcadero through West Portal will largely be funded by money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and federal grants. Outdoor vending machines might also be implemented at street level, for which MTA has set aside $3 million.
The new fare gates are projected to fix some existing passenger-flow problems, but we wonder how many new ones they will create. For instance, on TransLink's FAQ, they inform users that if a card reader can't read your card, it's always a good idea to carry a little extra cash on you. That's real reassuring for Fast Pass users!!
And how will this work for out-of-town visitors and other people who don't use Muni? There's also the whole Big Brother aspect of our every move being documented on some database. We guess this could come in handy if someone were to ever need proof of an alibi though...
TransLink has worked OK for SFist for the most part, but there have been some inconveniences. It takes up to 72 hours for your funds to go through to your account when paid online, and for some reason the Add Value machines at the Muni stations don't currently work for us. Since we've only tried the Add Value machines in a hurry, we haven't called TransLink to straighten it out and just simply paid our fare with cash.
We also got an error at one of the stations after using our TransLink card 90 minutes previously. The agent let us through, but what if we had been nabbed by fare inspectors at some point after that? The situation would have also proven annoying if we were at an unattended fare gate and had to run to the other end of the station. (This has happened a few times at Powell Station when none of the fare gates were accepting coins for some reason, and there was no agent on duty.)