I go to buy a ticket for the Red Line today and I drop in change to add up to $1.25. After about 90 cents, it won’t take any more change. So I drop in the smallest bill I can find, which is a five. I get change back in Sacajawea dollars.
I figure “OK, I have to buy another ticket to get on the Gold Line.”
So I go to buy the Gold Line ticket and what do I find out? The machines don’t accept Sacajawea dollars! And now the smallest bill I have is a ten! How can a coin come out of a machine, but not go in to it
God, that really sucks. I ride the blue line and red line everyday, but I buy a monthly pass, so the only time that I need to buy a pass is the first of the month, becuase I always forget to buy ahead. What drives me nuts about the MTA’s new machines is that they supposedly take this thing called TAP (which I can’t find any info on) and credit cards, but all of their machines say “Not TAP and NO CREDIT CARDS”. Get your freaking act togethor for petes sake. I wish we had a real public transit system, with maybe, just maybe, express lines on the rail lines for those of us who have to travel long distances on them.
You gotta love that. You know those bastards down at the MTA office are laughing their asses off at Metro Rail riders with a pocketful of useless Sacdollars. What’s worse is they sometimes give you a Susiebuck, which is almost impossible to spend anywhere owing to how similar it looks to a quarter. At least Sacdollars are a different color. But then, it’s pretty much an irony that LA has a “subway” at all. Still, at least it’s relatively clean, well policed, and (generally) runs on schedule.
Los Angeles…home of the eternally frustrated. I think this is the real reason Johnny L.A. moved up north.
Here’s a link (L.A. Times, may require registration) to the Times story about that. I hope they’re not spending a lot of money on this - shaving a whopping 5 minutes off the commute time if you go end to end is not really something that I can get excited about.
My example of poor ticket-machine design comes from CityRail in New South Wales, which covers suburban Sydney, reaching into what are arguably outer suburban areas like the Blue Mountains, Newcastle, and Wollongong.
About a month ago, my wife and I wanted to travel from Newcastle to Sydney International Airport using CityRail’s services. Arriving at an unstaffed station at around 5 am (to allow ample time for the journey, plus around 3 hours before an international flight), we found a ticket machine. The fare is $26.80, and the machine accepts coins and notes up to $50 notes. Digging in our pockets, we found $50 notes, and some small change, so I thought, why not put in a $50 note, plus $3.60 in change to buy two tickets? But no, the machine only sells one ticket at a time, and it has a sign saying that it won’t give more the $20 in change. Fortunately, after digging a bit further, we found enough $10 and $20 notes to satisfy the machines rules, but if we’d only had $50 notes and enough small change to make up the exact $53.60 for two tickets, we’d have had to pay extra becauise of the “no change over $20” rule.
(Incidentally, I do undertand a bit of the logic. If we’d wanted return tickets, that would have been pretty close to a $50 fare; and youy can buy weekly tickets, at $87.50, from that machine. However, I don’t understand why there isn’t a button to buy two or more of the same ticket in the same transaction.)
In my (admittedly limited) experience with riding the Gold Line during business hours, it seems that the bulk of the travellers are suburban commuters from the Sierra Madre/Pasadena/South Pasadena area. In a sense, this is a better plan regardless, even assuming a flat distribution between stations; it serves the people who take longer to travel more frequently, and reduces the number of nulls (trains travelling against the flow of traffic) pointlessly stoppping at ever outgoing stops) over the high volume timeframe. In other words, it works like load-balancing with asynchronous protocols, reserving a certain bandwidth for higher volume traffic.
