The SFMTA is a racket. I've had the misfortune to have to deal with them on a few occasions and they are some of the least accountable people working for the government.
I went thru the whole process of contacting their supervisors directly to dispute tickets [they sometimes presume you're not home and aware] and it basically boiled down to their word vs mine. Such BS.
I would love to see the agency dissolved, but it makes too much money needed to sustain other pet projects that this sacred cow is going nowhere, unfortunately.
My vain hope is they sue these municipalities to get access to those county (public?) resources which would allow them to operate in those communities again.
I got a ticket once for not turning my wheels on 2nd between Townsend and Brannan. The law is your wheels must be turned if the grade is greater than 3%. The grade, according to the department of public works, is 3.09% (http://bsm.sfdpw.org/subdmap/subd/Key_Maps/319_gm.tif). Next time I'll bring my protractor.
the MTA is too lazy to do a lot of things. They employ antiquated technology and pass the cost of their own inefficiency to the consumer in every place they can.
-Adding money to a Clipper Card from the website takes several days before the credit can be used. Apparently this has to do with the specific scanning hardware they have on the buses and some legacy Translink interoperability issues or something.
-Many of the parking kiosks interface are confusing (I once tried helping a lady only to find out she'd put in $20 because she kept not understanding she had paid).
-Fare-checkers are extremely self-righteous and rude. I once got off the back door of a Muni train because I'd realized my Clipper card was empty. On the way to the front door to pay in cash, the fare-checker told me he was going to write me a ticket because I got on and off the bus and that, despite my honest intention to pay the fare, he was going to write me up.
-Towing is $600, which includes $250some in SF admin fees, $250 is towing, and other other fees the towing company can freely tack on to work around the maximum "towing" fee that the city allows (in my case, a Flatbed Truck fee of $80).
-If you car gets stolen, and the police find it you get a 30 minute "courtesy" window to get to your car before they tow your car and you pay $500-$600 to get it out of the impound.
A friend that works for the city was telling me that the MTA has a lot of inefficiencies because they have humans in the process every step of the way and no incentive to change that. When they need to modify the process, they just add another human and another fee.
> -Adding money to a Clipper Card from the website takes several days before the credit can be used. Apparently this has to do with the specific scanning hardware they have on the buses and some legacy Translink interoperability issues or something.
…except that Walgreens is able to make adding value happen instantly… somehow.
The cards are stored-value - meaning that the card actually stores how much money it is worth. For cost saving and legacy reasons, most Clipper readers are offline and simply read and update the card value.
When you add value online, there is no way for the service to write to your card, so instead Clipper terminals throughout the system are informed of the value add and apply it next time they interact with your card. Online terminals, e.g. most vending machines, frequently synchronize with the online service and can transfer value added online almost immediately. Offline readers like those on buses, though, obtain a batched list of online value adds from time to time, often in the bus yard overnight via short range wireless networking - but in some areas this may happen less frequently than once a day. For Muni, I believe it should always happen overnight.
When you add value at Walgreen's, they set your card on a terminal that updates it directly.
This limitation is common to all stored value systems with offline terminals, including all Cubic transit card systems such as Clipper, Oyster, SmarTrip, etc. It's a compromise involved in rolling such a system out to a vehicle network without the expense of long range radio networking in every terminal - these systems were designed and implemented well before this was practical.
As a side note, design of offline systems that would generally be online is an interesting problem. For example, Onity/TESA door locks store an incrementing counter for determining the validity of keys. If you need to revoke a key, you make a new key with a higher counter value and insert it in each lock. When the lock sees a larger number, it increments its internal counter, and the old key will then have too small of a number and not work.
What's even trickier is when you want thorough logging. Clipper terminals report back card usage information when they update on value adds. Some locks struggle with this - for Onity locks, retrieving user history requires connecting a bulky diagnostic device to the lock. An interesting solution is that used by Cyberlock. In that system, an audit log is stored in the key itself and the key has a short expiry, forcing the holder to frequently reprogram it, during which the log is retrieved. The locks must still store a log too in case of disappearing keys, but it allows for fairly accurate logging without frequently having to visit every lock.
Thanks for that post — that's interesting, and explains a considerable bit. I ride CalTrain often, but their readers are bolted to the concrete… I'm surprised they're not updated more frequently? (Even the CalTrain operators say to give a week.)
The whole "tag on/off once at the beginning of the month" (which I've always thought was the weirdest thing…) then is to sync the on-card value w/ what you own I suppose, so that it scans properly on their readers. Now I wonder that given that I buy from Walgreens, if that's an absolute necessity, or a hardship imposed by people being too lazy to explain the inner workings of the card; it's a pain b/c if you forget to tag off, you get charged full-fare (and your monthly pass is deactivated until you re-add value to the card…), as I'd much rather just buy the monthly pass and not have to do the monthly tag dance.
If it's the case that Walgreens has "the specific scanning hardware" (note that the parent to my comment had that hardware on a bus), then that's exactly my point.
I don't ride the buses; I take CalTrain. There's three pieces of hardware of concern here: the scanner that checks your pass, the Clipper website, and whatever Walgreens uses. The scanners take a week to pick up payments through Clipper (first party), and instantly from Walgreens (third party). I find it exceptionally odd (and mightily inconvenient) that a third-party is able to add value into the system faster than the owners of the system themselves.
(edit: and see the sibling response to yours from
jcrawfordor for more info!)
The "fare enforcement" folks are not police, they cannot legally detain you and you are under no obligation to answer their questions. Just like the security guard at the front of Best Buy who wants to check your receipt, you can say "no thank you" and continue on. However if you give them your ID or information to write a ticket, it is binding.
I went thru the whole process of contacting their supervisors directly to dispute tickets [they sometimes presume you're not home and aware] and it basically boiled down to their word vs mine. Such BS.
I would love to see the agency dissolved, but it makes too much money needed to sustain other pet projects that this sacred cow is going nowhere, unfortunately.
My vain hope is they sue these municipalities to get access to those county (public?) resources which would allow them to operate in those communities again.