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The Clipper cards used by BART are 90s technology that took so long to fully deploy that it was outdated by the time most people started using it. There was a b
by plorkyeran 1y ago
The Clipper cards used by BART are 90s technology that took so long to fully deploy that it was outdated by the time most people started using it. There was a brief window where if you were an early adopter it was better than what was available in many places (or not-so-brief compared to OMNY, which came along a decade later), but unsurprisingly the things designed later have mostly improved on it.
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
- hedora 1y agoThey replaced rechargeable mag stripe cards with sub-second processing time and near 100% reliability (unless the gate was offline). I remember when the clipper cards rolled out. If I saw more than a few people holding one, I’d just go to the other gate.
- kelnos 1y agoI guess Clipper wasn't super reliable when it came out(?) (so long ago at this point it's hard to remember), but I don't really remember having much fondness for the old BART cards. (Not to mention the annoyance of having to pay for BART and Muni in different ways, or carrying around those silly paper Muni transfer slips.) These days, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with my physical Clipper card. I do recall lots of issues when they first rolled out the ability to put a Clipper card on your phone, but I haven't run into a problem with that in at least a couple years.