It took two years to become a reality, but you can finally ditch the superfluous Clipper Card and tap your credit or debit card directly to ride BART, starting this coming Wednesday, August 20.
It was nearly two full years ago when the Clipper Card system announced they would let you just tap to pay for rides with a credit or debit card, and we were promised the ability to do this across all Clipper Card-using Bay Area transit systems by summer 2024. But just as summer 2024 was approaching, Clipper announced that new feature would be delayed, with officials at the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) saying that the transition to credit and debit cards had “proven to be more difficult than had been estimated.”
Now it seems they’ve worked out the kinks. The Chronicle reports that you’ll be able to use credit and debit cards to tap into BART, without needing that extra Clipper Card from the vending machine, starting Wednesday, August 20.
That said, you will only have this privilege on BART at first, and not on Muni, Caltrain, or any of the other 24 Bay Area transit agencies that use the Clipper Card system. All of those agencies will eventually allow riders this capability. But it will be limited to BART at first, just in case there are any technical problems “right out of the gate,” so to speak.
“After evaluating the benefits and considerations, it was decided that we’d try to roll out open payments at one operator, and that the most impactful rollout could be at BART,” MTC Clipper Card program director Jason Weinstein told that agency’s Clipper Executive Board at a July 28 meeting, per the Chronicle.
Though do be aware that the Clipper tap system will only accept "chip-enabled cards," so that several-year-old debit card in the back of your wallet may not work. And transit officials are warning that you probably should take the actual card out and tap it, rather than just waving your wallet, because the system may encounter “card clash” where it recognizes several cards in your wallet, and doesn’t know which one to use.
Still, this is a very nice modernization that we’ve been anxiously waiting years for. Another modernization also just kicked in with BART, Muni, Caltrain, and several other transit organizations is that they’ve just tweaked their schedules to synchronize with each other, in what KGO is calling “the Big Sync.” This synchronization is meant to cut down on waiting around when you transfer from one system to another. All of these slight schedule changes are detailed in a BART press release, which claims that riders can save “up to 20 minutes per trip” under the new synchronized schedules.
Image: @SFBART via Twitter
