ORCA is here!
One of the more unfortunate things about ORCA is that while the principal idea of the system is to reduce transfer penalties, the technology doesn’t always run the gamut when it comes to giving transfer credit for every fare payment. Group fares are probably the best example of this, where bus-rail transfers aren’t possible when paying for multiple riders with one card. One of the problems I see is that most bus riders (let alone drivers) still aren’t familiar with this function, and that those that are aren’t really aware that their payment cannot be transferred to rail.
According to Brian Brooke, an ST project manager, the ORCA card is designed with a “one card/one rider rule.” But given that you can pay for multiple bus riders on one card but not be able to transfer them seems to defeat the two purposes of ORCA in the first place: the one card/one rider rule, and encouraging flawless transfers.
More below the jump.
The only way to use the card for a group on Link is to purchase paper tickets for each rider with the e-purse. That, of course, means that the transfer credit for each of the bus riders, with the exception of the cardholder, is lost. It’s not clear if the second bus ride of a bus-rail-bus transfer would get that credit, though. Here’s what Brooke had to say on the lack of group fare functionality on Link:
When a group fare is paid on a bus the driver has to input the numbers of riders and fare types, and the ORCA device calculates the total due. This fare is then paid from e-purse and that total amount is carried on the card as a transfer value, but the composition of the group (number of riders and their fare types) is not.
When that same card is tapped at a Link or Sounder card reader, the device just sees that sufficient transfer value exists to pay the fare for the cardholder’s fare type (adult, youth, reduced), but not that the transfer could cover or is intended to cover multiple fares. Further, in most cases an upgrade would be required to cover the full rail fare from the amount paid to cover the prior bus fare but without the group composition information the ORCA device can’t calculate and charge the appropriate upgrade.
So Sound Transit doesn’t record the additional passengers as boardings, doesn’t collect any upgrade that would be due from the group, and doesn’t even receive revenue in the apportionment of the transfer value that is on the card beyond what is needed to cover the fare for the cardholder. During system design we did try to integrate the bus group fare payment into the self-service rail platform card readers but without the group composition data carried on the card, this wasn’t possible unless we had buttons on the card readers – and this wasn’t advisable due to accessibility considerations.
So when the inspector’s card reader later reads the card it sees that a fare has been paid for the cardholder, but sees nothing on the standard inspection screens about fare payment for any other passengers (as those fares would not have been processed by the card reader at the station). The inspector could potentially pull up the card transaction history to see that a large payment had been made from e-purse within the previous two hours, and perhaps even calculate whether or not that amount covered the rail fare due for the group (which it in many cases wouldn’t since no upgrade from the bus fare would have been paid) – but that wouldn’t change the fact that the fare for those additional passengers actually had not been processed by the card reader at the station and Sound Transit was receiving no revenue for their trips.
The best approach to provide for multiple rail fares to be paid from a single ORCA card was to allow e-purse as a form of payment for purchase of paper tickets at the TVMs. This covers most instances of group fare payment on rail, but doesn’t provide for those folks who make the group payment on a bus with the hope of using that full transfer value on rail.
At this point, is it not sensible to deem the multiple rider payment feature a failure, and adopt the strict one card per ride policy used by successful transit agencies worldwide?
Perhaps Orca cards purchased with e-purse could be exempt from the $5 price.
Some places have sucessfully done multiple rider payments, such as Minneapolis. There, up to 8 riders can use one card on bus and rail, including transfers. Of course, their card readers at rail platforms have buttons!
I agree that Seattle should just eliminate the multiple rider feature since the transfers don’t work.
In Chicago you can do simple pass-back.
Chicagocard has passback for up to 6 riders and includes transfers. Those cards with monthly passes can also be used for passback with funds from an e-purse.
Yeah, sorry, Charles…didn’t mean “simple” as in “basic” or “limited,” but as in, “super straightforward instead of so complicated that even bus operators can’t figure it out after more than a year.” Sometimes I take my old Chicago Card out of a box and wistfully recall the good old days of the Brown Line or Blue Line commute.
So why cant we make teh “Paper Pass” system smarter? and have it recognize that you had a group on your last purchase, and (if it is within the transfer time frame) offer as a default pasage for that group on link to the Selected destination for the aditional cost of what ever the upgrade is? It is not as smooth as it should be, but it is far better than what we appear to have
You’d think a year and a half after release ORCA would be able to get a few things right… oh well. I really wanted this system to be easy and efficient, you’d think that would be the case with an RFID payment system, but I guess that wasn’t in the RFP. After using the system full on for a month now I’m less confident in suggesting it to anyone after my experience.
Note: I know this comes off as a bitchy rant, but I can’t be that different from most customers and these things need to be addressed!
Here are the issues I see:
1) The web site. There are to many issues to list specifically, but it’s pretty darn bad (why are important “next step” links hidden in the middle of a block of text)
2) I can’t know how much money is on my card. I get that it can take ~24 hours for the individual readers be updated with my balance info, so the lag between adding funds online and being able to use them makes sens. BUT why does it not show that on the balance online? If I add money on Monday and check the balance Friday it’ll still show $0 because they don’t update the balance until you tap, so unless you remember a) that you added money and b) how much you added you can’t know the available balance on the card.
3) Autoload only works when you can’t pay your fare. So, if autoload fails, you’re stuck w/o any fare. Honestly Starbucks has this nailed, “If balance is below $X add $N to the account” So I could set it to add $50 every time I was below the $10, this way even if it doesn’t autoload I can still take a round trip on the most expensive service in the region before I find out that it failed.
4) Passes (yeah, this probably isn’t directly under the vendor’s control, but needed to be dealt with by all the regional transit agencies. Why can I only buy passes tied to calendar months? There’s no *good* reason why I couldn’t buy a 30 day pass (or for that matter 10 day or 1 day passes). As a contract worker it’s hard to guarantee that in one specific calendar month I’ll need a pass at a specific denomination. I’d much rather just buy a 30 day pass on the day I start working and renew or not depending on my employment status.
I think one bus driver summed up the status of ORCA perfectly when I got in an argument with him over not being able to pay a fare due to a “Insufficient funds” error despite the fact that I had an autoload set up:
“You can’t trust ORCA to pay your fare, you always need to carry cash.” So apparently ORCA isn’t reliable… worthless!
Only Seattle could screw up something as simple as a fare card. We always act like we’re the first people to have ever done something.
Same EXACT system as ORCA, but much more informative, better and easier to use website, and looks like the site wasn’t made in 1994. OH, and I can still buy a day pass https://www.clippercard.com
I wonder how long before the ORCA apologists come here to defend an indefensible system.
ORCA preceded Clipper Card; the vendor may have learned from ORCA’s shortcomings and used those lessons to improve Clipper.
Clipper is, in my experience, borderline terrible, though it’s hard to tell whether it’s due to the technology or due to how the different agencies involved work together (or more frequently, don’t work together). The biggest fail with Clipper is that you frequently find yourself paying separately for the different agencies involved. If I want to get the best Caltrain fare, for example, I have to buy an 8-ticket pass that is valid ONLY for Caltrain. That’s 50 dollars on my card that simply can’t be used for anything other than Caltrain. Well, okay, 2-zone Caltrain monthly passes also work as passes for SamTrans and VTA buses (the two bus systems on the peninsula) — except those systems don’t have Clipper readers deployed yet, so if I want to use both SamTrans and Caltrain without paying extra, I have to get a non-clipper pass.
That, and Clipper has the same delay to add value that ORCA does, and as far as I know you can’t do group rates at all on it.
Seriously — Clipper is… alright… if you never leave the city of San Francisco itself, and thus only have to deal with one or two of the ten or twelve different transit agencies around the bay. But given that the population of San Francisco is about a tenth the population of the bay area as a whole, Clipper is, for most users, dramatically worse than ORCA.
No, seriously. People of Seattle: your transit agencies kinda rock. They talk to each other. They accept each others’ transfers. This is practically unheard of in much of the country. ORCA has flaws, but given the complexity of the task involved, and given how badly other areas have botched RFID fare medium rollouts, it’s, well, pretty good.
Actually Clipper (TransLink) preceded ORCA. A different vendor (Cubic) took over the project from ERG. ERG started work on TransLink before ORCA.
I racked up a huge bill on Clipper Autoload because of the transfer policy. And the cards seem to take longer than ORCA to be read.
Regional, multi-agency, fare cards are anything but simple, especially when dealing with multiple bureaucracies used to doing things their own way, across multiple jurisdictions.
Clipper was actually first proposed in 1993 (as translink), and it’s taken until just now to get it on the major agencies, two (VTA and SamTrans) aren’t even going to roll out Clipper until next year, and there’s no info on when the 2 dozen other agencies in the region are going to start accepting it. So in other words, it’s been a nasty rollout for Clipper, so nasty that they changed the original name (Translink) to it’s current name (Clipper) just so they could distance themselves from the issues that Clipper had.
You think ORCA sucks? Check out the TAP card in L.A.!
ORCA isn’t perfect. Happy now?
But it sure beats the heck outta having to line up to buy tickets every time we get on the train, or having to fumble for change (thanks to e-purse), or the rampant white-collar fraud enabled by the one-use/non-traceable monthly passes.
It saves money by speeding up the bus lines and reducing the overhead involved in monthly passes.
Perfect? no. Better than the old technology? Heck yah.
It took Sherwin 705 words to explain one aspect of Orca.
Is it any wonder people don’t really understand it that well?
I try.
Why do group fares even exist? I thought card systems were always one rider per card. If ORCA would eliminate or reduce the $5 fee (perhaps to $1), people would be willing to get cards for their friends and pay for a couple of their trips.
Yeah, that prohibitive five dollar fee is what’s causing the problem, that and the fact that there’s not that many physical locations you can get an ORCA card.
It’s a nice convenience for visiting friends, or when someone in a group forgets their card or their card runs out of value, their pass expires, etc.
Why didn’t anyone who was involved with the ORCA card travel to different cities/countries and see how they did it? Instead of coming up with something new, just learn how other transit systems did it and emulate them. ORCA seems so…bleah.
I used my ORCA to get my mom, sister, and I up to Seattle and back from Federal Way. We took the 574 to the airport, Link to downtown, then 578 back to FW.
The 574 operator was confused by the system, and just waved my sister and mom on.
I bought the Link tickets on my card. No need for a transfer, one seat to Seattle and the transfer would have expired anyway.
And the operator on the 578 knew what was going on but that was a one-seat trip so it wasn’t a big deal to not get a transfer.
So my trip worked, yet in a broken way. I dont understand why a lot of operators STILL seem intimidated by ORCA OVER A YEAR after it has been in use. I used to occasionally than not get an operator who didn’t even know how to make it only charge one zone if I was only riding from Lakewood Towne Center on the 574 to Tacoma Dome Station.
So much of the complexity of ORCA & Clipper are that we don’t have unified tariff systems like almost all regions in Europe. There the fare from any zone to any other zone is the same, regardless of which agency operates the service or mode. Somehow there is a uniform tariff and the agencies figure out a way to share revenue. In the U.S. we expose the policies on the transit rider so that every single agency gets to have its unique fare structure, transfer policies, etc., and of course the transit payment systems get necessarily complex. If we had a federation in each area which set regional fares and disbursed them, we could at least simplify this aspect of riding transit – and should be able to simplify the smart cards – maybe even allowing for group rides on one card – and certainly enabling day passes.
I’ll probably get yelled at for going off-topic, but this seems to be a facet of Americans’ desire for “more transparency”, which is good in most cases, but there are times when more is truly less. The complex fare systems in areas with more than one transit agency are good examples, but I’d like to bring up another: sales tax. In Europe, tax is *part of* the price of an item, not added on. In America, it seems that there is a presumption that how much of your purchase is going to the governor is more important than the total price. I think that’s silly. When a price tag says 99 cents, the price should *be* 99 cents, not $1.08….
I wonder how much is being lost in fares due to rider & operator confusion?
And while it may not matter for someone who has a monthly pass or only ever uses one route, in Europe it is much more common to use transit to a whole variety of destinations for all kinds of trips, using subways, trams, regional trains and buses – and I certainly believe having a simple, standardized fare system encourages such trips.
Companies here prefer to list the lower price, though they are responsible for payment. Just like the airlines and their Fees.
Value Added Tax, as used in W.Europe, is paid every time an item is sold based on the “value added”. Kind of hard to break it out from the price, so they don’t try.
To be fair to ORCA and the other U.S. systems, Europe has had its share of problems.
That’s an open-ended statement, and I’m not sure what it means. I do know that these tariff associations have been around for 20 or 30 years, and they worked when the machines printed out paper tickets.
Americans like local control, and that means small suburbs with their own governments, and several transit agencies. TransLink in BC covers the entire province, and I’m sure that’s too “socialistic” for many Americans.
The other thing is that, in averaging the fares, some agencies would lose money. They don’t want to do that at any time, but it’s especially a problem during a recession when they’re cutting service anyway.
But ST and Metro are making small steps to bring their fare regimes closer together. ST is going from a 3-zone system to in-county and inter-county fares next year, and Metro’s and ST’s fare increases have been following each other every six months or so. So I used to have to pay 50c above my Metro-1zone pass to ride the 550, then zero for a while, and now 25c.
Actually, TransLink in BC covers only Metro Vancouver, which has half the land area of King County (though over half of King County is mostly wilderness). It is separate from BC Transit and it also does bridges, roads and vehicle emissions testing.
Carl has pretty much nailed one of the underlying problems with the complexities of the ORCA system. It incorporates seven different agencies with seven different zone/fare structures and then tries to divvy up the money between them. The common denominator in many of the other successful systems that have been cited is that the cards are being used for fares on a single transportation entity. The difficulty lies in having One Regional Card for All without having One Regional Transportation Agency for all.
But that’s a whole different subject…
In this case, the agencies want ORCA to succeed, as its failure will make a stronger case for consolidating agencies into a super regional agency or for an integrated tariff system.
The agencies may want it to succeed but they aren’t willing to do much to make it easier for it to succeed. I suspect it has wide (forced) adoption for monthly passholders but only partial adoption by pay-per-ride riders, especially on Metro where you get more value by paying cash and getting better transfer privileges.
Hmm. Some of this looks familiar:
“The ability to use the ORCA card to pay for mulitple riders is functional – but so seldom used by passengers that they often encounter driver confusion and delays as they board and attempt to use their card to pay for guests. . . . group transfers are possible – on the second leg of a group fare trip, the passenger needs to let the driver know they previously paid for multiple passengers. The driver then enters the screen for mutiple pay – then the passenger taps the card, registering “Group XFer”. Group payment is STILL not possible on Link, at least in a way that is tranferrable – a passenger can use their ORCA card to buy multple tickets, but those tickets are not valid as transfers aboard buses. – jw). On Metro, you hand the customer as manypaper transfers as they paid for passengers. No paper transfers on Sound Transit, CT, etc. – so those folks are apparently out of luck and will have to pay full-fare when they transfer to another bus or rail.”
http://pstransitoperators.wordpress.com/?s=orca+group+fares
April 21, 2010
“Group Pay
This feature is used so seldom – and is ultimately so confusing to both passenger and operator – it should be discontinued. The customer is unaware that they must first let the driver know that they wish to pay for multiple passengers; the driver must remember how to get to that screen from the last time they did it 3 months ago, and in order to use a group transfer, the passenger must remember to ask the driver on the transferring coach to go into the group screen again BEFORE they tap their card. Result: delay, delay, anxiety, frustration. Not worth it.”
http://pstransitoperators.wordpress.com/?s=orca
September 7, 2010
I agree with both blogs – the feature is too confusing to use for riders and operators both, too buggy (if the passenger taps their card BEFORE telling the driver on a transfer trip to set it up for group the group transfers can’t be accesssed), and it e-transfers don’t work for rail or rail tickets as transfers back to bus. Not enough people use/need this, and in its current level of dysfunction it gives the appearance of incompetent design.
Yes. I see no need whatsoever for this feature. I don’t think anyone expects it to exist and it’s too dysfunctional to be useful even once people know it exists.
Orca works fine for me…
So long as I only use it to pay for myself, and so long as I only ever load it at a TVM.
My wife loads hers online and has no trouble with it, but is afraid to ever let it drop below $20, because of the berating she’s gotten from drivers when it’s run dry during the reload lag in the past.