TransLink and Golden Gate Transit, an airing of grievances
Two mornings a week I ride my bike to work. The rest of the time, I walk 15 minutes to the nearest Golden Gate Transit bus stop for the number 10 which very conveniently drops me off directly in front of Federated Media’s office in Sausalito. We like to call it the Sausalito Tech Bus.
To ride the bus, I have to buy 20-ticket booklets at $54.40 a pop. They last about 2 weeks, and don’t quite fit neatly into my wallet. The only time I hate them is when I have to reorder them, because it always catches me by surprise, because Golden Gate’s online store can be slow bordering on nonfunctional, and because it means I have to outlay $108.80 all at once (might as well buy a month’s worth, right?). But it’s WAY better than having to scrounge up $3.40 twice a day (plus you get a 20% discount when you use tickets).
And so the idea that I could get a new-fangled TransLink RFID card that would automatically debit my account each time I rode the bus was a revelation. No more tickets, ever! Here’s where it gets tricky. Since you can take Golden Gate Transit all the way up to Santa Rosa, they’ve divided the North Bay into zones, and each time you cross one, your fare goes up. My tickets were specifically for crossing 1 zone, from San Francisco to Marin or vice versa. But with the card, in order to know how much to debit my account, I have to tag the card when I’m getting on the bus and on the way off.
I can imagine some engineer giggling with delight after uncovering such a simple solution to figuring out how much to charge a card holding user. The problem with this simple solution is that no one ever has to pay on the way off a bus—except for BART, and they have gates that prevent you from even leaving the station unless you insert your card because it’s so unintuitive.
So the other week, I forgot to tag off. It was bound to happen. Which means I was going to get dinged the maximum amount for the ride from Marin to San Francisco ($4.72) instead of the $2.72 it should be. Suddenly I’ve got a brand new problem I did not have before. I got this sick feeling in my stomach that I’d just lost $2, too little to make a fuss over, but enough to nearly double what it should have cost me to ride the bus—instantly negating the convenience of TransLink over tickets.
So I went to the TransLink website to verify that I had been overcharged, and it turns out they don’t have that information online! They’ve built a system where I can tag a card on any Golden Gate Transit bus (and apparently any BART train and soon Muni too), tell me my account balance, and know how much to debit me based on where I get off, BUT THEY CAN’T LIST THOSE CHARGES ONLINE IN HTML??!! Nope. But I can request a transaction report which gets delivered to me via email as a nicely formatted PDF a day later. I just hope there wasn’t someone behind the scenes generating that manually.
So I look over the form and find 4(!) times where I hadn’t been credited upon exiting the bus—meaning I’d been overcharged $8 in 2 weeks since starting to use the service. So imagine my extra-joy tonight, when I tag on the bus, and it tells me “CARD BLOCKED.” I try again. Same thing. I try again. Same thing. Now when your card doesn’t work, or if TransLink happens to be down, I still have to pay to get on the bus. Tickets are only good for 6 months, so there’s no sense hording a few backups in my wallet. Luckily I had $3.40 in ones and coins.
I’m pretty sure I know what happened. When my account runs low, they charge my credit card $40 (an amount I specified online) and add that amount to my account. The other day I got an automated call from Wells Fargo about some potentially unauthorized charges to my credit card. Everything was kosher, but for whatever reason, they declined the charges from TransLink. I got no email notification or phone call from TransLink that this had happened. Just CARD BLOCKED.
Now when I was on the phone with someone at TransLink the other night, dealing with one of the 4 overcharges (I didn’t know yet there were others) I told him that my card should accept any new charges from TransLink, and he noted that for their accounting department. So when I’m on the phone again tonight, I discover that the bus TransLink sensors only get updated when they go back to the depot, so though my card had already been unblocked in the TransLink system sometime today, the bus didn’t have the latest download. To the bus, I was still persona non grata.
And then I discover this interesting tidbit. That due to the fear that people would abuse customer service by asking for fare reductions (because they willfully neglected to tag off) Golden Gate Transit apparently only allows TransLink to make two corrections to a person’s account. Ever.
This is what it sounds like when a customer decides it might be better to go back to using the old technology that works.
Update: I tried my card again (for the last time) this morning: CARD BLOCKED.
My card got blocked once, after 3 weeks of trying to unblock a card, they eventually had to replace it with one that was not blocked out of the system.
At the same time they also lost $70 in automated commuter check deposits when they replaced the card since their system does not automatically forward deposits to replacement cards ( that only took 2 weeks to clear up *after* the new card arrived)