BART Cards Due to Suck Less

Fri., Feb. 15 2008 at 8:41 AM

Categories: Public Transit

A working BART ticket is the unicorn of San Francisco public transportation. It is elusive and keeps you guessing. Will it work? Bending a BART ticket, keeping a BART ticket next to a magnet, and being mean to a BART ticket are all things that will cause it to spew defiantly forth from electronic gateways. But the San Jose Mercury News reports that a new initiative passed yesterday will eradicate at least one of those problems. The MTA approved allocating $3.7 million to improve the magnetic strips on the back of BART cards making it harder for the information stored to be erased. Cell phones, magnetic purse clasps, mp3 players and computers are all items that can render a card useless. The new cards will be out later this year. -Andy Wright

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BART, commuters, public transportation

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Yes, BART tickets are indeed fical, but they're getting much better - and there's a way around ever needing a BART ticket again! Before I get to that, I want to make two points of clarification. First, the MTA runs MUNI, and the BART Board of Directors runs BART. So the MTA didn't do anything yesterday, the Board of Directors did. Second, three years ago we switched from paper to plastic tickets as well as completed the installation of replacing all of our fare equipment. Now you can almost crumple up a plastic tickets and our machines will still read them. You can even get them wet, and the machines will read them. But dear god, get them next to a magnet, like one on a mobile phone case, your purse snap, or something else and you will pull you hair out. That's why the Board is ordering tickets that will have magnetic strips 9 times stronger than the current one - about as strong as the magnetic strips on a credit card. How often does your credit card not work? (Well, maybe if you don't have any credit left.. but that's a different problem.) But there's a way to avoid ever having a ticket problem again. That's to sign up for BART's new EZ Rider card. You simply tag it ontop of the fare gates and they open! To make the card work, you assign a credit card or bank account to it and everytime the balance on the card drops below $10, it charges your credit card and replishes up to $48. (You also automatically get the 6.25% discount - meaning you pay $45 for $48 worth of rides.) This means if you have it you'll never have to visit the ticket machine again because you'll always have money on it. It's very secure. And if you lose it, simple call BART and we'll immediately cancel the card and issue you a new one so nobody can use your lost one and charge you. As for magnetics It has an electronic chip in it that's impossible to erase with magnetics or virtually anything else. How do you get one? Signup at http://www.bart.gov/news/features/features20061018.asp It's hard to keep up with the demand for this card, so sometime we put people on a waiting list, but we usually will get you a card within a few months, if not a few days. Hope that helps! --Linton Johnson BART Chief Spokesperson
I don't ride BART that often, but when I do, I've <b>NEVER</b> had a problem with the card. What do you people <i>do</i> to them?

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