TransLink: More Delays?
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been working on implementing a region-wide electronic farecard, called TransLink, for some years now. The current plan is to expand it to Muni, BART, and Caltrain by the end of 2007 (hence the readers you see on streetcars, and the apparently non-functional metal boxes with TransLink logo you see on many buses). But there are likely to be more delays, according to a report in today’s Chronicle. The Examiner also reports.
(Many other transit systems have used cards like this for years – e.g. Oyster, Octopus, SmarTrip, Suica. However these have generally been slower to be adopted in the US than in Europe and Asia.)
Translink isn’t the only system like it that’s being installed (and delayed). The TAP system in Southern California is having similar problems, so the many readers that were installed everywhere half a year ago are still not functional, and don’t seem like they will be for the foreseeable future. It’s interesting to compare this style of rollout with what NYC’s MTA did with their Metrocard system. There, the readers were installed at a few stations at first, and were functional right from the start. Over the course of a couple years, they spread to the rest of the system, and the readers and cards were both eventually upgraded. Now, the Metrocard even works to a limited extent across transit agencies, being used on NYC transit and Long Island Bus (both parts of MTA) as well as the PATH subway and suburban Westcher County buses. And they’re testing a contactless payment system now too.
Here, on the other hand, they’ve gone for the “big bang” approach, installing the readers everywhere, and then hoping that their (probably very expensive) consultants can make the software parts work. And the software is by far the harder part, especially given the sheer scale of the system. It seems like yet another one of those IT project disasters one keeps hearing so much about.