The importance of frequent transit service

I was flying back into the SFO airport yesterday, and since I live in the South Bay, I needed to find some form of transportation to get me home from the airport. Fortunately, there is a BART station right at the airport, and I live quite close to a Caltrain station. I even had my Translink card with me. Unfortunately, I missed a BART train by 30 seconds. Since BART only runs every 20 minutes, that means that I would miss the connection to Caltrain, which runs once an hour, which would mean that I would get home an hour later than if I had run slightly faster to catch that train. Instead, I took a SuperShuttle, which, with waiting, actually got me home almost exactly when I would have gotten home had I not missed that train, but at considerably greater cos ($40 instead of $8.25). In this case, the reason I did not take transit was not transit's speed, and that is given that a local Caltrain is pretty slow and waiting for the connection takes time too. Rather, it is end to end travel time, which is a function of both travel speed and waiting time, and the latter is largely determined by frequency. And it's a virtuous cycle: increased frequency can increase ridership, and I suspect that the Moscow Metro would not be as popular if headways at 10:30 pm were 20 minutes instead of 4.

Translink on Caltrain: so many frustrations

Here's an email that I recently sent to Translink (soon to be Clipper) customer service to express my frustrations with the implementation of this fare payment system on Caltrain:

I've recently seen flyers stating that Translink will soon be the only form of payment accepted on Caltrain for monthly passes and zone upgrades. I feel that this is premature, and that there are a number of features Translink needs to have before it can match what is offered by the current Caltrain fare system. The main issues are zone upgrades, monthly pass activation, inter-agency transfers, and availability of vending machines.

First off, the availability of Translink vendors in the Caltrain service area is spotty at best. Right now, I can buy a monthly pass or 8-ride at any Caltrain station, whereas I can only do Translink transactions at the San Francisco or San Jose ticket offices during business hours, or at some Walgreens that are not necessarily near the stations, and may not necessarily even be willing to deal with Translink transactions (I'll file a separate complaint about the concrete cases of that). It would be nice to have Translink Add Value Machines installed at Caltrain stations, especially San Jose, but possibly also other popular stations such as Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and Hillsdale.

The next issue is monthly pass activation. According to the brochure, when I buy a monthly pass for a given set of zones, such as 3-4, it is not activated until I tag on and off in the respective start and end zones, and that if I tag on and off in different zones, it will instead give me a pass for those zones (and I will be charged accordingly). This works great for someone who always travels between the exact same stations every time and never ventures anywhere else, but is a major inconvenience if I happen to be travelling to a different zone on the first day of the month. It means I either have to jump off the train at an intermediate stop to tag my pass, or else save the tagging of the pass for a different day and pay full fare, which seems incredibly unfair given that I've already paid for the pass.

On a related note, the handling of zone upgrades seems subpar. If I have a monthly pass, and wish to travel outside its zones, I have to buy a paper zone upgrade. If I do the intuitive thing and tag on and off, I get charged full fare, which is effectively charging me for something I already (mostly) paid for. Furthermore, in a comparable situation on AC Transit, it works the opposite way. If I have a local pass and wish to upgrade to a transbay ticket, I must use Translink e-cash to pay, not actual cash. This seems frustratingly inconsistent for a fare system that was supposed to provide some consistency among the Bay Area transit agencies. Also, with Translink, zone upgrades are no longer usable with 8-ride tickets.

Finally, there is the issue of broken interagency transfers. At San Jose, Caltrain connects to express buses operated by Monterey Salinas Transit and Santa Cruz Metro, neither of which are members of the Translink consortium. Both of these agencies provide discounts to holders of Caltrain monthly passes (in fact, MST provides free rides throughout its system). With the switch to exclusive use Translink as the medium for monthly passes, it will be impossible to provide these transfers unless MST and Highway 17 Express operators have the ability to read Translink cards.

I believe these issues need to be resolved before Translink can be made the exclusive form of fare media for monthly passes and 8-rides on Caltrain. I think Translink is a wonderful idea, and can be wonderfully convenient if implemented properly, but very frustrating if the implementation is half-baked. I hope these issues are addresses, because I'd very much like to see the Translink system succeed.