Thursday, February 3, 2011

More on Millbrae BART Caltrain Clipper transfer

Pictures tell 1000 words.

Line for one of two @BayAreaClipper readers at Millbrae. Half... on Twitpic

This line was to tag off the Caltrain at Millbrae before we could enter the BART system. 10 people had already tagged off before I took this photo. 8 people in total could not complete the tag off transaction, go 30 yards to the BART faregates, tag into the BART system, before finally the BART train that was on the platform when we arrived, departed without us. Instead, we waited for the next train, 15 minutes later. 2 hours of lost time from one Caltrain, for lack of more readers, more appropriately placed readers, or a better software setup that would tag us off Caltrain when exiting BART. Multiply this by dozens of trains per day, 200+ work days per year.

I hadn't seen lines like this before - but February has brought with it the end of the paper eight ride tickets.

4 comments:

Jym said...

=v= I don't understand why Clipper-onto-BART couldn't be an automatic tag-off from Caltrain.

Mike said...

Also, everyone with monthly passes has to tag on the first work day of the month. Ugh. The lines in Mountain View Tuesday morning were horrendous as well, and there are several readers on each side.

John C. Baker said...

I agree with Jym and have put it out on Twitter before. I refuse to believe that the Clipper system is so unintelligent that it couldn't do a double transaction -- tag off the train and onto BART at the same time.

Silas Barta said...

Just found this when googling after finally realizing how you're supposed to do it. I had always assumed that it would work like you described: the entry from caltrain to Bart should take care of all the necessary transactions.

Sadly it doesn't work that way and my card gets penalized for it several times before I realize what's going on.