BART and San Francisco Bay Area Ferries
BART is a very good transit system with very outdated payment technology. The machines that accept cards can only sell up to 5 transit cards. To buy a card you have to first slide your car to see if the card will work, about half the time it displays the message that your card has been declined only because the card reader is not working or you just bought 4 tickets and you now wish to buy two more for your family of 6. When it does work every tick is for $10.00 and you have to use technology and system reminiscent of texting from the 1990 to either add or subtract dollars and/or nickels to get the correct fare posted on a printed sheet stuck to the fare vending machine. Really? What century automation is that from?
The ferries system is not much better; it has poor description and a card reader that is worse than the BART system for read failure errors.
In summary these payment systems are anything but intuitive and requires a full time attendant at both locations to help passengers navigate the #$%^&* machines. Furthermore, the machines lack any type of security for skimming devices placed over the card readers which can be easily done at off peak hours.
Honestly, this is the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. Can a high school science student come up with a better system?
The idea of the machine is to be able to take payments quickly and easily without the need for an expensive human to assist.
BART payments systems blow…
