UPDATE below.
Now confronted with coughing up 75 cents* every time I board a Sound Transit bus, and refusing to carry around several rolls of quarters everywhere I go, I’ve decided to pick up a few ticket books. Little did I know how difficult that would be.
First of all, there is no 75-cent option at the ticket book store, despite this being a fairly obvious need for a lot of people. Community Transit, whose ability to assign creativity and common sense to problems makes me quite envious, manages to have 75-cent tickets, and indeed every 25-cent increment from a half dollar. So I can use those on any Sound Transit bus, right? Er, not quite:
Community Transit (and Everett Transit) tickets are only valid on ST Express routes operated by Community Transit (510, 511, 513, 532, 535).
D’oh! That’s seamless integration for you!
Well, there’s the next best option: buying a 25-cent and 50-cent ticket book. That’s more paper to shuffle around, and slower boarding for everyone, but it’s better than messing with quarters. So I’ll just buy 20 of each, right?
[Note: Blogger ate the screen capture I had here. The punch line is that 25-cent tickets come in packs of 16, 50-cent tickets in packs of 20.]
I can’t fathom any reason at all for the difference in quantity. It’s not cashier convenience: 20 25-cent tickets for $5.00 is easier, change-wise, than 16 for $4.00. So now I have to buy five 25-cent books and four 50-cent books or condemn myself to a somewhat complicated inventory management problem.
This kind of customer convenience is one of the best reasons to take an SOV to work.
*Aside: Why not just buy a $2.50 Puget-Pass? You have to take 36 trips a month for a Puget Pass to pencil out. If I take an ST bus in the morning and a Metro trip in the afternoon, only the $2.25 pass is worthwhile. If I often take an evening carpool to a Seattle-side bus stop, the $1.75 pass is the only one worthwhile. More commonly, of course, this dilemma applies to anyone who usually commutes in-city but occasionally has to go across the lake or down-county.
UPDATE 4:07pm: And we’ve gone from the infuriating to the absurd:
Now 25-cent tickets aren’t even an option! Perhaps Metro is getting back at me.
That’s pretty outrageous. Why can’t they just sell the tickets in the same quantities for each type?
As you note yourself, the most convenient option is to get the $2.50 pass. Sure, it’s not 100% cost-effective, but the convenience of having one little pass that you use for every trip is easily worth a few dollars when compared to the hassle of carrying around a stack of tickets sold in mis-matched quantities.
Why are they sold in different quantities? No idea.
Chris,
You’re of course right. But then, you underestimate just how cheap I am.
Martin you’ve hit one of my gripes on the head. But an even more salient example.. (I’ll use the old fare structure since that is the one I have experience with.)
Lets say your usual commute is a one-zone peak fare on Metro only. But sometimes you’ll hop a two-zone Sound Transit Metro Bus. Even if you were just paying cash and transferring there is a $1.00 difference that must be paid. Logically if you’re doing this with a pass it would be ideal to use a $1.00 ticket. But low and behold there is no $1.00 ticket. (Nor was there for that matter a $2.50 ticket for Metro if you were exclusively taking a two-zone Sound Transit bus operated by Metro.)
Instead of rolling out a bunch of tickets, what I really want to know is will ORCA have a dollar value side in addition to a monthly fare side? That would be ideal, and would truly offer seamless integration. As long as you have some money on the dollar value side you can ride any Puget Sound bus, not having to worry about if your pass is for the right dollar amount for this run.
Martin, have daimaji slip this question into his Rapid ride interview with Metro.. Its a really good question.
A better question about community transit tickets is that “Metro also accepts Community Transit Tickets.” but not Metro operated Sound Transit buses? Why the hell not? I could understand if any metro operated service didn’t accept community transit tickets, but why one and not the other?
I’m in Minneapolis (lived in Seattle in the past). We have a system called the GoTo card which is similar to your planned Orca. GoTo allows you to have passes and money on the same card. We don’t have zones, but we have rush-hour/non-rush-hour fares and express/local fares so some people buy, say, a local non-rush pass and use the money component to pay the difference if they ride an occasional rush-hour or express bus.
What I’d like to see is something like a bus debit card. If you’ve ever been on the Bay Area BART you know what I mean – vending machine paper tickets with a mag strip on them. You buy the ticket in whatever denomination you want, and each time you use it, the proper fare is debited from the ticket. The larger your initial buy is, the larger the discount (ie, buy a $45 card, get $48 worth of fares; buy a $60 card, get $64 in fares).
Any ticket-vending machine can tell you how much fare value is left in the card.
http://www.bart.gov/tickets/types/types.asp
The Minneapolis GoTo system is a combination pass/debit card on a durable reloadable plastic card. You can put money (you get $11 credit for $10) and/or 31-day passes on it. If you have a pass and ride above its level, the difference can be taken automatically out of the money side, and an embedded transfer issued. Better than BART tickets!
John-
Very cool. I’d be happy with that system too!
I neglected to mention in my prior response, that I too have thrown up my hands in disgust, trying to work my way through the Metro pass sales site.
Payment should be the easiest part of transit ridership – not the hardest! (Aside from actually scraping up the moolah, I mean.) I wonder how much it would cost to buy the infrastructure (vending machines and on-bus farebox upgrades) for a BART/GoTo type system?
Thought I’d follow up with what other readers of this blog probably already knew: I looked into the ORCA card (as I should’ve done before opening my flytrap!), and discovered that if and when implemented, ORCA does pretty much exactly what I was suggesting in the BART/GoTo model. Except that it works via RFID rather than mag-strip.
So when will the results of the ORCA tests become available? What’s the outlook on getting ORCA operational?
quux, ORCA is strung up right now due to some issues with the manufacturer of the equipment/cards.. (Or so I’ve read.)
Although I’ve seen ORCA readers on just about every Metro bus out there. (Including the ones parading around as ST buses.)
I’m pretty sure about the fact that Metro accepts CT ticket books and fare tickets/transfers.
Just check out the CT website and go to “Fares and Passes”.
Scroll down about a page ‘n a half and you’ll see the section ticket books.
CT sells just about all fares starting at the half dollar, like you said.
Hope that helps! ;)