It just got four times easier to buy a new adult ORCA Card:
More than 120 retail stores, including local QFC, Safeway and Saar’s locations, just joined the 40 transit agency venues that sell ORCA cards…
There are currently 126 retail locations throughout King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties that participate in the ORCA program. Most QFC and Safeway stores in the region participate, as well as Saar’s Market Place, the downtown Seattle Bartell’s, Kingston IGA, Vashon Thriftway and Roger’s MarketPlace in Mountlake Terrace.
Until now, riders could only load new fare value on an existing card at these locations. Now, they can also buy “adult” ORCA cards. Transit riders who pay reduced “senior/disabled” or “youth” fares must still go to customer service centers to get their ORCA cards since proof of eligibility is required.
Currently, all participating retail outlets are selling cards except the downtown Seattle Bartell’s at Third and Union, which is in the process of finalizing a purchase agreement. A complete list of stores that revalue cards or sell cards is available at orcacard.com.
The excuse that ORCA is hard to get is getting thinner. It’s time for Metro to remove incentives to pay cash (e.g. unequal transfer policies) and start creating incentives to use the sales infrastructure they’ve helped to create.
Direct link to the list of retailers (since it’s hard to find things on orcacard.com):
http://www.orcacard.com/ERG-Seattle/p2_002.do?m=42&i=543
OMG that website is bad. A list of retailers in text form? Everytime I go there I have flashbacks to 1994.
You can view the location of ORCA vendors on Sound Transit’s interactive map.
http://www.soundtransit.org/Maps
I still don’t get why we have to pay $5 for the ORCA card. I hope this gets phased out as it gains acceptability. Or at least make it so you can get $5 back if you return the card for people who are here visiting and don’t want to rent a car/ don’t have the cash.
Last year I was in Boston and paid $18 for a weekly pass on all transit and didn’t have to deal with any kind of card surcharge.
I was just in Sao Paulo and I paid $20 reals (about $10 dollars) for a card loaded with… wait for it… $20 reals of subway/ bus credit!
Does anyone know how much an RFID enabled card actually costs?
Roughly $1.
…Which Metro loses thousands of times over every day as people hold up the bus to fumble for their cash, or ride for 6 hours on a paper transfer.
The last time I checked (May, 2011), Teri Lapetino at Sound Transit told me the cost per card was $2.41.
RFID cards cost $1. That’s what they cost.
If someone claims $2.41, then she is including administrative overhead, and that administrative overhead is ridiculously inflated.
Or maybe there’s a sole source supplier of the cards who is making a bit on each one.
In quantity 5,000 they can be bought for $0.54 so if ST is claiming $2.41 they are charging $2 in overhead which seems reasonable as most cases they have to process a credit card transaction, set up an electronic account linked to a bank account and physically mail out a card. The other $2.50 is pure profit; a 200% fare recovery ratio.
It’s a proprietary card, not a generic RFID card.
No, it’s not proprietary it’s standard RFID: The card uses the ISO/IEC 14443 RFID standard. Specifically, the MIFARE DESFire EV1 which, implements all 4 levels of ISO / IEC 14443A and uses optional ISO / IEC 7816-4 commands.
Fine. Reduce the card fee to $2.50. Make up the lost potential card revenue with all the operational savings from increased ORCA usage.
That’s how to do it. Charge for the card, but put an amount of e-purse money equal to the card price on it. (And hand out free cards like candy to social service agencies.)
DC charges $5, Transport for London – £3 (close to $5), San Francisco’s Clipper card is $3 but free if you sign up for Autoload…
In short, ORCA is roughly the same cost as other agencies.
DC = rebate available when you register it online
London = fully refundable, massive discounts, daily cap
SF = can be free, as you say
In short, ORCA is the only one that screws you with a flat fee, no fare advantages, slow payment processing, and a disadvantageous transfer window/
ORCA is 150% more expensive than any other bus smart card in the US&A. The average post-rebate cost, not counting ORCA, is less than $1. Seven of the other fourteen bus agencies with bus smart cards provide the card for free or rebate the full card cost.
Do SF or DC have paper transfers? How long are they good for?
The middling:
SF Muni has paper transfers, strictly torn at 90 minutes. But while they exist as a legacy of bad Seattle-esque policies past, their current purpose is to serve as system-wide POP. And Muni paper transfers are naturally phasing themselves out, because:
– A monthly Muni pass is still only $66, or $76 with full use of in-city BART. So buying a pass is a no-brainer for any regular user. (One can’t say the same for Metro’s $90/month for exponentially shittier service over a similar in-city area.)
– BART users receive a transfer discount on Muni fare by using a Clipper, but not with cash.
SF fare payment’s primary legacy drawback is the issuance of night-owl transfers on paper, but not on the smartcard. As I said, SF Muni’s best features enable big-city transit volumes, while its worst features look exactly like Seattle.
The good:
Washington, DC: No transfers without a SmarTrip card. Period. Local buses are 20 cents cheaper using SmarTrip. The local bus fare is only $1.60.
Still don’t understand why Metro doesn’t offer a discount for using ORCA. Would be very easy to raise cash fares by $0.25 per trip and keep fares paid with ORCA steady. The extra revenue could even be used to bring down the price of the card by a couple of dollars.
Metro is planning a potential fare restructure along with the next fare increase. I think we’ll get an announcement by September. I’m hoping for a cash surcharge, along with replacing the zone system with premium fares for peak-express routes.
Changing the $5 fee is more difficult because Metro can’t do it unilaterally. It requires agreement by all the member agencies, and most of them are in worse financial shape than Metro.
Meh, it’s only money. It’s not like Metro is having a budget crises and needs to watch where it’s dollars go. I wonder how many people use these occasional free giveaways as a reason to hold off on buying an ORCA card until they can get one for free.
??? Kill the zone charge in favor of a premium route charge ???
What about when you want to ride an express route for a relatively short distance? Lots of people ride the 197 and 179 between the Federal Way TC and Twin Lakes P&R (They are like hybrid local/express routes). I imagine a few people take 178 to get a quick ride between S Federal Way and Downtown FW. Sometimes I ride 197, 173, or 193 between Kent Des Moines road and Federal Way. Are you saying that everyone who rides those routes should pay Seattle fare no matter where they are going?
When I am ever up at the U district and trying to catch a bus a dozen blocks north, I would love to take a community transit bus to get me there instead of waiting for the next metro bus, but @ $3-$4 simply because it’s an “express” route, I don’t do it. The current system is good because it makes Seattle riders pay Seattle fare, and no one else.
AlexKven, that’s how the cookie crumbles. When you’re trying to run an effective transit network, speed, simplicity, and legibility sometimes trump absolute fairness. Folks wanting to ride between 356th and 320th without paying the extra have the option of using the 182. When you’re in the U-District, you can use the 48 or 73 at the base local fare. It’s vastly faster and more efficient to have a “one bus, one fare” system which bases the fare on the principal purpose of the route than it is to dick around with adjusting fareboxes and having drivers sit at stops while they answer endless fare questions.
The current system makes you pay a surcharge to crawl for 45 minutes on a packed counter-peak 40, while someone else pays the exact same rate to comfortably speed home on a non-stop express bus with 4x the normal frequency to ensure that no one ever has to stand.
That’s not a “good” system at all. It’s unmitigated bullshit!
Y’all need to visit London. No transfers, massive cash surcharges, £84 “Penalty Fares” if you’re caught on public transport of ANY kind without proper fare… On the less punitive side, there is a smorgasbord of visitor passes and travel cards available and there are daily caps on fares paid if you use an Oyster card. The prices will shock you, until you start asking how much it costs to drive here – Gas alone is about $8.50 a gallon.
I expect the 179 to go away in favor of increased peak 181 service. I also expect the 197 will drop its underperforming neighborhood tail and just keep the express portion of the route.
With a system of local and express routes, more neighborhood tails might be converted into separate local routes.
How does London deal with people who can sometimes scrape together a few pounds for a full fare, but have to choose between transit, food, and rent or medications? Are they just forced to walk, period?
Council housing. And the National Health.
A huge part of Seattle’s “transit problem” is that people keep insisting it double as a social service agency.
That isn’t what it’s for. It’s for getting around. Period.
If your paper transfers and your cash-fare parity and your crawling detours and your total lack of on-board behavioral standards are keeping people from getting around via your service, then YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
Council housing. And the National Health. <<— This.
If the state is too right-wing to pass a state health service law, how about single-payer?
Council housing is something the City could actually do on its own, though it's much better if the entire state passes such a requirement (because otherwise all the homeless people migrate to the City).
London does have free transfers between underground lines. And the underground is so extensive that many people rarely take a bus. That may be how it can get by without bus transfers.
The round-trip cash fare for London bus journey would be £4.80, significantly exceeding the Oyster price cap of £4.40 to ride the things all fucking day. Not to mention that Underground Travelcards and Travelcard-equivalent Oyster price caps include any and all bus transfers within the relevant zones.
No one pays cash, unless they are an idiot. THAT’S how London can get by without bus transfers.
This is one of those Seattle things without a valid defense, Mike. Paper transfers need to die.
I wish there were more places you could get a kids’ ORCA card.
+1. Could it really be that hard for retailers to be able to confirm ID? Maybe they could be held accountable by ORCA somehow (like be required to scan the kid’s identification with the date of birth.).
My wife just suggested something on this point:
The issue seems to be someone at Metro verifying that the Senior/Youth actually is being given to a Senior/Youth person. If we don’t want to trust a store clerk with that awesome responsibility, how about having a network of “trusted” places, like the staff at an auto licensing office or a somewhat accessible notary or somebody like that be authorized to make the decision to sell someone one of these cards.
Not completely convenient, but certainly better than the current situation.
How about librarians? They already have ID and age for library cards…
Or, better yet, Schools and Senior Centers…..
Schools seem like the logical place to distribute Orca cards to children. Just pick a day during the school year where the teacher collects the money from anyone interested, and writes down the students’ names of a form. The school then sends Metro the form by mail, gets the cards a week later, where teachers distribute them to students.
Should in theory be pretty simple. If only it didn’t require two different government agencies to talk to each other…
As the system is now, my six year old will be five until he’s eight. And Metro deserves the loss.
I would have gotten him one on his birthday if I didn’t need to drag him to King Street to get it done. My boy loves the bus, and would be proud to have his own Orca card.
Can someone link how to do it by mail? I looked and couldn’t find anything. I’d rather do it in person so it’s “real” to him, but alas. Maybe next time we take Amtrak during the day.
I never did find anything on-line about buying a youth card by mail. Just used the standard paper order form and wrote in 3 youth cards, photocopied 3 school IDs, mailed it in, cards came in the mail.
Like I said, they do a lousy job of advertising that alternative. Where do kids in Enumclaw get ORCA?
http://www.orcacard.com/ERG-Seattle/p3_001.do
“Mail: Purchase Adult, Youth, or Senior card and add value to your card. Print the mail-in form. Include proof of age for Senior or Youth card.”
As far as I can tell, that’s the only place it’s mentioned, and that’s all the detail they give.
Schools manage to allow private photography contractors to sell picture packages through the classroom. Do you suppose there’s enough margin in the system to spiff teachers 50 cents for each ORCA card sold in class?
I just bought two youth ORCA cards by mail. The instructions on the web site seemed fairly clear to me.
If you need to take Amtrak to get to King Street, why can’t you get the youth card in Everett, Lynnwood, Tacoma or Lakewood? I got one for my nephew at Tacoma Dome.
While they do a lousy job of advertising it, you can get a kid’s ORCA card by mail, you don’t actually have to go in person to one of the few places they’re sold face-to-face.
The nearest live purchase location to my office is more than an hour round-trip; the nearest to my home is more than a two-hour round trip. People in much of King County have no reasonable access to in-person purchase of youth-fare cards, can’t imagine the situation is much better farther from Seattle.
When I complained about this lack of access, they asked why I didn’t just buy by mail… As if that option had been presented anywhere on orcacard.com
They did want proof of age, school ID was acceptable, don’t recall what else might work.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem to list acceptable forms of ID on the website either. My almost-6-year-old doesn’t have a school ID, they don’t do that in kindergarten. I’m guessing if I bring his birth cert or his passport, that would work.
Come to think of it, our youngest didn’t have formal school ID, we used a copy of some other school paperwork that included age.
7-11s in other cities sell transit passes. Is there some reason the ones in seattle don’t do this? Even the two new ones in downtown seattle don’t do this. Maybe the one preparing to open at 3rd and pike can start a trend.
naive question– what are the “incentives to pay cash (e.g. unequal transfer policies)”?
The reason I got an ORCA card was to pay less in transfers (when switching from the bus to the light rail). Where does it cost more to use an ORCA card than to pay cash?
When you get paper transfers on Metro, they’re often cut for longer than the strict two hours you get with an ORCA fare. Add to that, many operators will let you on if you have a recently expired transfer. That’s before getting into fraudulent uses of transfers.
I saw a woman on the bus one time that actually had an accordion file with transfers by color and letter.
I agree that KCMetro should eliminate paper transfers. Period.
thanks, got it.
If I were the driver, I’d wave those people on too, rather than argue about “it just expired because my connecting bus was late so really it’s Metro’s fault”
So true. Metro drivers handing out 4+ hour transfers is doing nothing but encouraging cash use over ORCA cards. There was one time when I was taking my sister (who has no ORCA card) to Seattle, and I paid for myself with my card, and I paid for her with cash, and she got a 4 1/2 hour transfer! And since I didn’t have a pass loaded on it at the time, I started thinking that maybe I should have used cash.
Pierce Transit has only 1-hour transfers, but in the vast reaches of King County where peak rides on I-5 can really stretch out, that would be quite harsh. How about 90-100 minutes? Or a more strict 2-hour policy?
How about no paper transfers, period?
You guys really dislike infrequent bus riders, don’t you?
Or my personal favorite: Metro drivers operating Sound Transit buses who allow passengers on by showing a paper transfer.
Mars, we dislike slowness. Paper transfers and cash fares create slowness. And occasional bus riders can live with paying twice (if they’re just riding once) or can get an ORCA (even if their car is in the shop and they’re just riding for a week or two).
If we have to keep paper transfers, then the times of the paper and ORCA transfers should be set so that the ORCA transfer represents the maximum, not the minimum, possible paper transfer time. I’d do that by giving the ORCA user three hours and instructing the operator to set the paper transfer for 90-120 minutes from the last time point. I’d also allow the Owl transfer when using ORCA.
“You guys really dislike infrequent bus riders, don’t you?”
Infrequent riders are the crux of the issue. I believe in a cash surcharge, but I also think many STBers don’t realize how much of the ridership is occasional riders. I don’t have a number but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s close to a third or a half, especially on local routes. The solution is the general principle of simplicity. A few frequent routes rather than a spaghetti tangle. A handout on the bus listing where to obtain an ORCA card. What if whenever somebody pays cash, the driver points to the stack of handouts and says, “You’ll get a better deal if you get one of these.” Occasional riders by definition don’t know the things that frequent riders know, so there will always be new people to publicize ORCA to. It would be ideal if they could just get a $1 or $2 card at the farebox (*) (**), but if that’s so impossible then Metro needs to do the second-best alternative.
(*) I’m persuaded that free would lead to too many unused cards stuffed in drawers or thrown away.
(**) San Jose VTA offers RFID day passes through a farebox dispenser.
The “why” is legacy. Not wanting to alienate existing riders or make it more expensive for the poor (who disproportionately pay cash). I’ve heard you can get a paper transfer if you pay with an ORCA e-purse, so that would eliminate the inequity.
Why would a paper transfer be necessary for an e-purse rider?
Trips reaching their final time point after 9:00 p.m. will give paper “owl” transfers, which are good all night, including on the first trip on any route the next morning. The ORCA transfer window remains a strict 2 hours.
Interesting bit about OWL transfers. I thought that if you use ORCA, you are out of luck since you don’t get an owl transfer, but that’ nice that they do that.
“but that’[sic] nice that they do that.”
No, it’s not. It creates all kinds of easy opportunities for fraud and waste. Once a low-income ORCA program is in place to protect the truly needy, paper transfers should be phased out as soon as possible.
I hate to say it, but the chances of Metro enacting a low-income ORCA program in the near future are slim.
For one thing, if the threshold is 200% of the federal poverty level, over a quarter of the ridership will qualify. That would be a massive hit on fair recovery, digging the operating budget hole several million dollars deeper, before even considering the administrative cost of the program.
Secondly, Metro has projected that fare changes have only a small effect on low-income ridership.
Tertiarily, some employers and major institutions (e.g. UW) will ask to reduce their payments for all their cards based on the percentage of their cardholders who qualify as “low-income”.
I don’t like Metro’s math, but I have nothing with which to challenge it.
The thing about fare fraud is that most of those who engage in it really can’t afford the fare. Simply put, there is no additional fare revenue to be made from stamping out fare fraud. There is only money to be spent engaging in the exercise, and hopefully dissuading those of us who can afford to pay to do so.
The worst case scenario is when someone spends the night in jail for trespass, making that cell unavailable for booking violent criminals.
Stamping out fare fraud will not bring much marginal revenue, but it will yield considerable security benefits. The pyschological position of a rider who has had to ask the driver for a free ride is very different from that of a rider who triumphantly beats the system, or thinks he does, with a recycled transfer. Any bus driver knows that the ones who apologize for not having the fare are not the ones who cause the trouble.
“Why would a paper transfer be necessary for an e-purse rider?”
The point is that they qualify for the longer transfer time since they’re a Metro rider. Maybe they’re making a round trip or going to several destinations in a row. Metro has allowed that for decades, so a subset of riders shouldn’t be discriminated against, especially since they’re using the “most efficient” payment method. Raising ORCA’s time limit is not something Metro can do unilaterally; it would have to be a joint decision by all the member agencies.
I have a one-zone peak pass, and face a surcharge only once every month or two, so it doesn’t make any difference to me. But if I didn’t have a pass I’d be more concerned about it.
Sure they can. Not for other agencies but on Metro routes they could extend the transfer period. It would add another level of complexity to the fare structure but unlike the incompatible zones, tap-on/tap-off rules, etc a transfer bonus falls into the catgory of what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s already a mystery regarding transfer time if you set foot on Link.
So tapping on a Metro bus would give you two transfers, a three-hour one on Metro and a two-hour one on other systems? One, can ORCA do that, and two, it’s the height of confusing.
Don’t take away those “unequal transfer policies”–just fix ORCA.
You do understand the meaning of the word “unequal”, do you not?
During my research on low-income and no-income fare programs, I came across the UPLIFT program to make monthly passes for Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority available to a limited number of homeless individuals who agree to enter into case management.
It is not a program to enable homelessness. It is a program to help people exit homelessness. The bus pass certainly can’t accomplish that by itself, but it is part of a menu of wrap-around services that collectively help individuals get back on their financial feet.
Making such a program happen here would require an agency that pays part of the portion of the passes, and Metro agreeing to discount the rest of the cost.
The pass could be a on a standard ORCA card, and therefore usable on ST, CT, ET, PT, and KT, as well as Metro. Metro’s match could be out of a mitigation fund set aside from the portion of low-income riders’ additional fare revenue from fare increases, as a way to comply with Title VI, as it applies to the fare increases. At least in theory, such a fund would make the total fare collection from low-income riders not go up, and simultaneously increase low-income ridership.
While it costs $5 to get a card, this isn’t going to happen.
Fares are complicated. That’s just the way it HAS to be.
I remember the ORCA implementation team visiting one of the Metro bases before they brought up the beta version for testing. I pleaded with them to simplify the system of fare payment, flipping through the pages in ‘The Book’ showing all the different ways someone can pay. I counted about 275 different acceptable fare options and media, with all the exceptions to the rules and they almost proudly corrected me, saying No, we have over three hundred of them.
I asked “is it any wonder that drivers don’t even try to learn them all?” I then produced a flash pass, walking by them at normal farebox boarding speed, flashed the pass, and asked them what they just saw. Not one of the three could correctly identify what I showed them.
PATHETIC.
Now they have shoehorned a decent payment system (ORCA) into learning the system for many agencies, with layers of complexity, and wonder why only transit nerds can comprehend it. Could you pass the test?
Fares really don’t have to be complicated. It’s just much, much easier to make them complicated than simple.
Two-tier fare structure, with ORCA and cash levels, applicable all over the region:
1) Local, Link, and short-distance express service: $2 ORCA, $3 cash
2) Long-distance express and Sounder: $4 ORCA, $5 cash
The challenge here isn’t technical, it’s political, and it’s very, very difficult.
How would you distinguish between “short-distance express” and long-distance express” without resorting to the zone system?
My inclination is to say that any kind of peak-only commuter express gets the express fare. To clarify, I’d apply this not to the buses Metro currently labels “express” like the 358, but services like the 5X or 252. If the route (or trip) doesn’t provide all day service, it’s an express and gets the higher fare. Admittedly this doesn’t work well when you start to apply it beyond Metro (e.g. Sound Transit’s multi-county fare).
I’m on the fence about lumping Link and Sounder into this, as I’m partial to the distance-based fares on those services.
Do any of the participating transit agencies aside from Pierce Transit incentivize the use of ORCA cards? As a regular PT rider, I always found it irritating that I was penalized for using my ORCA card on a KCM route.
The card says “One Regional Card for All”
so much for logos, as ORCA was hobbled from day 1
What does Pierce Transit do to incentivize the use of ORCA cards? I’ve never seen it. If I remember right, PT has the lowest adoption rate of any of the agencies (other than WSF).
Just don’t try to get hold of ORCA card customer service over the phone. You can’t. They’ll lead you through every possible phone tree combination except the possibility to speak with an agent.
certainly not my experience.