Translink Card - The Review
Reports have it that Muni plans on replacing our beloved paper FastPasses with the TransLink Card sometime later this year. Unless you're some kind of shut in, you have already seen the green and gray TransLink card readers all over your regular bus lines and Muni metro/BART stations as they have been testing the system for over a year now. So, what is this mysterious TransLink Card? It's a stored value card with a smart chip embedded on the surface that can be used to pay fares on AC Transit, BART, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit & Ferry, and most (but not all) Muni lines. The card vaguely reminds this writer of phone cards we used to use back in the early '90s when we lived in Europe. Cutting edge technology!
Anyway, curious about how this TransLink Card worked, and feeling the need to seize control of our transportation destiny in the face of yet another wrath-inducing increase in the cost of the FastPass, we switched over to the TransLink Card at the beginning of January. After nearly six weeks of use, this is what we have found:
The Good
It's Convenient! Probably the best feature of the TransLink Card is the convenience factor. You want to get on the bus, you swipe the card. You want to ride BART, you swipe the card. You never even have to take the card out of your wallet. Just swipe, swipe, swipe. A real snap for the big city go-getter getting ready to go.
It's Flexible! Do you live in the city and only occasionally partake of service from any of the other of our region's fine transit agencies? Well then, you can buy a poor person's FastPass, load it onto your TransLink card, and throw on however many extra American dollars you might think you'll need to ride a bus around Oakland or take BART to SFO. Now you, the consumer, can maximize your transit riding value. Power!
It's Green! Well, sorta. The TransLink Card is a chunk of plastic but only needs to be purchased once. Five dollars! You just keep adding value to the card, month after month, time without end. No longer will you have to contend with stacks of FastPasses cluttering your wallet and ruining your back, only later to be ripped from your hands by a frisky zephyr to end up floating out to sea and being churned into festive, seasonally colored confetti in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
It Does Tricks! The TransLink Card tracks and catalogues your every move which can then be downloaded into rider history report that show you exactly when and where you swiped your card. If you're like this writer, a person who enjoys obsessively tracking every aspect of your life on a variety of spreadsheets, you will love, love, love this feature. If you're a paranoid, Ayn-Rand-worshiping teabagger, maybe not so much.
And now -
The Bad
Missed Swipe Factor. We would estimate that about a third of our swipes were not read by the card readers as we attempted to access our conveyance of choice. On Muni buses, this is not that big a deal as you just re-swipe until the reader gives you a virtual thumbs-up by displaying the value deducted from your card. At the BART and Muni metro turnstiles, however, it's a major hassle. The reader displays on the BART turnstiles will glare at you with a "See Station Agent" message in angry, red letters. How embarrassing! In January, we took BART to the airport four times and to the Mission at least twice and fully fifty percent of the time were confronted with this horrifying situation. The TransLink cards and readers definitely need to sit down and spend some quality time figuring out their communications issues.
Major Website Lag. One of the great things about the TransLink card is that you can add value to it from the comfort of your own home via their not-very-intuitive website. Unfortunately (and they warn you about this), it can take up to 72 hours before the value you add actually makes it onto your card. Um, no. This is the 21st Century, an era made magical by the prevalence of sleek silicon iThingies that give you what you want, when you want it. 72 hours is like three whole days! Unacceptable. Also, if you receive a CommuterCheck from your employer, you will not be able to load the value to your card from their website. You will have to haul your CommuterCheck to the nearest vendor and have them add the value for you. No fun.
Vendor/User Cluelessness. We bought our TransLink card at our nearest friendly Walgreens store. The Walgreens lady was very enthusiastic about selling us the card, but failed to instruct us that you can actually load a FastPass onto it. The brochure the card came with also said nothing about the all-important FastPass feature. In fact, we'd gone through two CommuterChecks, an additional $20, and were ready to take to the streets in protest like annoying hippies before discovering while researching this post that adding a FastPass was even an option with the TransLink card. Duh.
Aesthetically Challenged. The TransLink card is decorated with a swooshy green digitalesque image that's meant to convey the message that the user is about to be sucked into The Matrix and tortured by the machines, or similar. Apropos for Muni riders, perhaps, but not very pretty to behold. The TransLink peeps should take a cue from European phone companies and issue collectible designer TransLink Cards with like ten different images through which the user can express their unique and special snowflake like individuality. Or, even better, an option to create your own card by uploading the images of your choice. We have no doubt that tweener girls from here to Hayward will be willing to pay a premium to snap up rainbow and unicorn adorned TransLink Cards of their own design. Potential major money maker!
All in all, we are totally impressed with the TransLink Card and enthusiastically welcome it into our family of Bay Area accoutrements. Two elated thumbs up.