Most of the development effort was focused on a non-problem — improving the reconciliation for transfers between agencies. The other focus was to make sure agencies were not forced to rationalize or integrate their fare systems at all, so the ORCA system needed to accommodate each agency’s separate fare structures and business rules (despite fare integration having been one of Sound Transit’s initial charges). Customer needs were not represented as directly in the design process (especially customers who want to transfer between bus and rail, and don’t want to maintain a pre-paid balance). With all the attention on agency needs, and little on the customers’, it’s not surprising that some customer service issues remain. So in a sense it’s fair to say it was half-engineered (since the customer needs weren’t a major factor in the design process), but I think in fact the over-engineering to meet every possible agency platform requirement was the biggest factor resulting in some drawbacks to the customer experience in implementation. Personally, I’m actually surprised that the system is working as well as it has so far.

Regarding WSF product offered – that is the decision of WSF to offer those products and only those products on the ORCA card, not the ORCA people. Same reason for Car and Driver/Motercycles, etc.

The supposedly secure, encrypted magstripes on their paper tickets/transfers are actually very poorly secured – there’s only a very basic checksum, and you can’t really call that secured at all, since you can just recalculate a valid checksum for any changes you make.

That was a big part of a pretty well known Defcon talk a few years back. It’s trivial to forge a magstripe that gives you free rides for life, with $5 of off-the-shelf equipment.

The RFID cards (like Orca) aren’t much stronger. The encryption is almost trivially weak, but the equipment needed is 10x more expensive.

I’m pretty sure that’s not at all how it works. Imagine if there was a database on the card. Not only would that make these cards much more expensive than they already are, but it wouldn’t take long for enterprising digital tinkerers to figure out how to edit that database to contain $999,999.99! Systems in NYC and Boston that contained value on the card have been hacked in just that way.

No, I’m pretty sure the ORCA card is mostly just a chip with a unique number, and the only thing the card “knows” is that it is Card Number 00343452873462345 or whatever. Maybe it’s more than that, but I’m pretty certain it doesn’t contain how much is in your epurse or what passes you have. It tells the reader what its number is and the reader looks that number up in an ST central database to get your epurse and pass info.

Which means there’s no reason at all why the online system can’t update your purse info much sooner than 24 hours.

Even if this were the case — that the value was stored on the card — why couldn’t it update immediately upon my using it at a reader? It will after 24 hours, but not before.

It also seems you should be glad they don’t just cancel your card for non-payment. You and you rkids kept riding, then a tax-payer paid employee had to ‘handle’ your card expiration issue. That seems like a waste of my tax money.

But let’s say it wasn’t Link I was planning to take, but a bus. And I don’t have $2.50 in exact change lying around and won’t be able to go to a bank.

One has to wonder though if ST’s POP checkers on LINK will ticket you if you board at a station where the stand alone readers are not working properly. i heard they will….