If you want to follow the savings (as a non pass user) you’d need to use cash and transfers until December 31 after which you won’t have an option to save any money. I’d probably want to try to start gently encouraging people to use ORCA in the meantime while there’s still an option… Give people a discount for pre-loading $10 or $20 at a time or something.

This will be the case through Dec. 31, 2009, when bus transfer slips will no longer accepted on light rail trains.

http://www.soundtransit.org/Riding-Sound-Transit/Fares-and-Passes/Transfers.xml

Before, they were valued at $1.50 (a one-zone ST fare) with the exception of ST Express issued transfers which were counted as their full value. This will eliminate the need for cash users to purchase upgrades at TVMs.

Unless I missed something, what’s unclear is if transfers will be honored in the fashion for ORCA E-purse users. If not, it would create a monetary incentive for cash customers to continue paying cash for as long as possible.

So does anyone know what the Link policy is if you don’t have an ORCA, just a regular PugetPass? Obviously you can’t tap on without ORCA, and you shouldn’t have to buy a ticket from the TVM if you have already paid by purchasing a monthly pass.

As long as your pass is of a higher denomination than the Link fare for your trip, do you just get straight on to Link, and if a fare inspector comes about, you show them the pass? Or are you required to somehow get a Link ticket? I’ve been looking around on the ST and ORCA websites trying to find an asnwer to this, but none of them really seem to give a straight answer to this question.

… it looks like the guy is hanging himself. WTF.

Recently, a number of card processors have been out-of-order on at least one leg of my trips throughout Seattle. (And the other day a Metro driver told me that none of them had been issued ORCA cards, so it sounds like drivers have no way to physically test the readers.) With the participating agencies soon to dump paper passes, if the processors go out, it sounds like we’ll have to pay cash for each leg of the trip, and I resent even the thought of doing that when I have a valid, fully-loaded ORCA card.

So, assuming the card processor issues are going to continue (including the ridiculous lack of validators or processors for the S.L.U.T.), has anybody heard what the policy is/will be when you have an ORCA card that can’t be used due to equipment malfunction, or have already used the card on one leg of a trip and are due a transfer? No transit agency has been able to answer that, so far.

A final note: On July 6, Cubic Transportation Systems, a longtime competitor of Vix ERG, announced it was acquiring (at least in part) Vix ERG’s U.S. operations. This means Cubic will now oversee ORCA.

I heard an incident today on the radio where everything was frozen around 14:00 in the tunnel. All buses were to hold where they were. I think most were in the bores.