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Yeah I was pretty blown away when I visited San Francisco just how archaic it was. In the same place you have driverless cars you have a metro payment system fr
by IshKebab 1y ago
Yeah I was pretty blown away when I visited San Francisco just how archaic it was. In the same place you have driverless cars you have a metro payment system from like 70s USSR or something.
- jeffbee 1y agoThe mag stripe 1960s technology worked much better than the new one, I'm sorry to report.
- kelnos 1y agoI'm sorry to report that you're looking at that tech through rose-tinted glasses. I remember electronic systems that would routinely fail to properly scan the mag stripes. I remember all the people working retail who had special tricks to try to get a card to scan, which would help maybe 25% of the time. I remember cards becoming demagnetized for random reasons and becoming useless. I remember when merchants would have to take a physical carbon imprint of the card, and would have no idea if the card was even real until the paper was processed, days or weeks later.
- jeffbee 1y agoWe are talking specifically about the BART fare gates, which worked perfectly for 50 years.
- xattt 1y agoSo tokens and kopeks? Because there were no mag stripe systems in 1970s. > https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766 https://www.ebay.ca/itm/174311087766
- saghm 1y agoI remember when I was in college in the early 2010s finding it amusing that SEPTA still used tokens in Philadelphia. On a whim I looked it up, and apparently they did finally stop using them, but only in 2024.
- zolland 1y agoHow did you pay? I made a Clipper account that I fill up with my credit card and tap my phone to pay...
- owlbite 1y agoWhich is still shockingly outdated compared to e.g. London, where I just use my tap to pay method of choice on entry and exit, done.
- zolland 1y agoI mean it auto fills/pays from my card. It's just one extra step at setup. I agree it would be nice to just take my card at the rail, but "Shockingly outdated" seems a bit dramatic lol. It's certainly not comparable to "70s USSR" idk where that came from
- lazyasciiart 1y agoOooh, even behind e.g London, the first city in the world to offer tap and pay with bank cards!
- inferiorhuman 1y agoYou can do that on BART as well.
- jlebar 1y agoThey introduced tap-to-pay with your credit card a few weeks ago.
- platevoltage 1y agoI was going to say the same thing. I saw this and I don't even ride it regularly anymore.
- antihero 1y ago(which we've had to some extent for thirteen years now)
- gshulegaard 1y agoI don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems. I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area CA, Portland OR, and Philadelphia PA over the last 10 years. All of those metros have comparable public transit payment systems with auto-loading special use cards and are at various stages of adopting support for tap to pay. Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted. Internationally I think there is a larger range of experiences. I don't travel enough to properly gauge it, but I was in Paris in the last year and I don't think public transit payment was better. Still had to acquire specialized fare cards and navigate different payment systems between RATP and RER. Honestly, SF Bay comes out slightly ahead of Paris if only because Clipper is unified between various transit options (BART, Bus, Ferry, CalTrain) IMO.
- nilamo 1y ago> I don't know what your frame of reference is, but BART is above average for US public transit payment systems. That doesn't change anything in the comment you're replying to. Just because it's above average for the USA, does not mean it isn't also ancient by global standards.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gshulegaard 1y agoAnd yet I included a favorable international comparison as well.
- jnsie 1y ago> Honestly, within the US I can only think of NYC as having a better payment system as they were first movers on tap-to-pay adoption and it's basically fully adopted. Chicago is pretty good too. IIRC they also have tap-to-pay. In fact, I think they had it before NYC
- 1y ago
- britch 1y agoI mean the answer is in the question--why are the self-driving cars (largely funded by billion-dollar private companies and VC) available in the same city as this anarchic public transit system (funded by largely by regional taxes and ridership fees)
- jrockway 1y agoI just use my phone to pay for BART?
- __loam 1y agoThe Moscow metro system is actually supposed to be pretty good.
- WTFnsfw 1y agoBeing built in 1960s-1970s it has proper ventilation. Unlike older systems, like in Boston, where you are forced to breathe in brake dust.