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A lot of subways have accepted the use of contactless credit cards or debit cards by touching the readers at the gates to pay for the fares. BART and MUNI still
by ww520 2y ago
A lot of subways have accepted the use of contactless credit cards or debit cards by touching the readers at the gates to pay for the fares. BART and MUNI still use Clipper card only.
I’ve asked someone work inside and he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is.
- rsynnott 2y agoGiven that you can, fairly easily, get a virtual stored value card on your phone, arguably little reason to change. As a visitor to SF, I was able to set up a virtual Clipper card and top it up in a few seconds, and it's presumably a lot cheaper and less complex for the operator (doesn't require talking to card networks). Though, I still have ~$8 Clipper credit on my phone that I may or may not ever use...
- ww520 2y agoI had $20 on the old magnetic strip card that was never used and got obsoleted. I had Clipper cards laying around with various remaining balances. I suspect the loose changes gained by the operators gave them less incentives to move forward.
- danudey 2y ago> he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is. It's not worth the money to the suppliers to go through the trouble of managing the upgrade of that one system alone; likely there's an opportunity cost where they have limited resources and they want to focus on the bigger projects making bigger impacts and bigger sales. The last building I lived in, the sliding balcony doors were all starting to wear out. Building management called the company that made the doors to ask them about repairs or replacement and were told that the cost of replacing the doors for people isn't worth their time; basically, why would they come fix our old balcony doors for $x when they could spend their time on building and installing new balcony doors on a new build for $xx?
- Tostino 2y agoToo bad word gets around too slowly to actually make a difference in those new install numbers. Ideally, a company like that would lose sales to someone who offered better service to existing customers (who want to spend more money with you).
- MichaelZuo 2y agoAren’t there higher end manufacturers of balcony doors, who do offer premium service?
- acchow 2y ago> BART and MUNI still use Clipper card only. They also support Apple’s Transit card (Clipper card in your Apple Wallet) so it works by tapping your phone, without unlocking it. It should also work with your iPhone turned off (newer models I think iPhone 14+ only)
- mind_heist 2y agohow does the transit card work if the phone is turned off?
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y agoBecause not all of it is turned off.
- numpad0 2y agoSomething is always on to handle power button, tender battery, as well as USB. NFC payment has to be compartmentalized for security, as a tangential. At that point you might as well fuse those features into one companion computer and let it handle NFC payments under certain conditions, so people can take a safe ride home with a dead phone.
- acchow 2y agoThe iPhone continues to run various functions while turned off (including find-my-iPhone with BLE via the global, mesh network of iDevices)
- numpad0 2y agoIMO, prepaid/stored value is fine. Not everything has to be rolled into the legacy monolithic global realtime-but-batched-too post-pay credit card infrastructure.