Quote:
Originally Posted by 1overcosc
That makes me curious, how many cities have transit smart cards? To my knowledge, Ottawa, Gatineau, Hamilton, Kingston, and Montreal all use them, while Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo are rolling them out.
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Translink in Metro Vancouver is rolling out the Compass card. There have been lengthy delays but it is currently being used by tens of thousands of people a day as they do a phased roll-out. Post-secondary students are transitioning their U-Pass cards to Compass and that will boost use by a good hundred thousand-plus in the fall and I think they are currently aiming for a full roll out early next year.
Cubic is the supplier and it is a tap-on/tap-off system, and it is due to this second piece that the delays stem. The wireless readers on buses are taking too long to read taps (promised read time is less than half a second, and sometimes this isn't met) and Cubic is kind of stuck because they promised in their bid to do this (and won) and now they cannot seem to deliver. Translink isn't prepared to forfeit the tap-off part and, rightly, notes that Cubic is contractually obligated to meet the performance measurements that they promised in their successful RFP submission. It's a fixed-price contract, so in theory Translink isn't losing money on the delays, but the general public is testy and the botched roll-out of Compass was one of the main reasons that the public voted 'no' in the referendum and is convinced that Translink is incompetent.
A common refrain is that it was folly for Translink to not have originally built faregates/turnstiles into SkyTrain, ignoring that Translink didn't exist when original SkyTrain Expo Line was built by the Province in the mid 1980s, and the Province elected to again not include faregates/turnstiles when they built the Millennium Line in the 1990s, again, before Translink existed. Translink elected to not install faregate/turnstiles on the Canada Line since no other part of the system had them, but they ensured that the stations were designed to accommodate them (as opposed to the extensive, costly renos that were required for the Expo and Millennium Line stations). In the late 2000s the Province decided that Translink would install faregates and foisted the program on the agency without any additional funding, but later relented and provided some money to cover part of the station renos (the Feds kicked in a bit, too). All of this is in the context of Translink having lower fare evasion numbers than many systems with faregates and turnstiles and the annual cost of maintaining the faregates will exceed the amount lost to fare evasion each year.
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