Clipper, the Caltrain nemesis

Clipper is a terrible service but not for the reasons outlined in this post. This post misses the point that tagging on and tagging off is a simple and relatively elegant solution to the problem posed by Caltrain charging by distance traveled.

But that's not the real problem with Clipper. The real problem with clipper is their horrible customer service. Here's my story with clipper - and I hardly think I'm alone.

I got my card about a year ago when I was going from San Jose to Redwood City once a week. On their web page I set up an 8-travel auto-pay system where I get 8 San Jose<->Redwood City tickets, and when I run out it buys a new set of 8 automatically.

This works great until one day I missed my stop and wound up in Gilroy (woops). What SHOULD have happened is that I tag off, pay full price for the ticket I actually traveled, and have the 8 ride ticket refunded. If the card 'balance' (non-ticket cash on the card) goes below $0 (or, for them, $1.25 for reasons I don't understand) then it debits my account for the remaining balance.

Instead what happened was my card went 'negative', and they shut down the card until I went to a Walgreens (?!) to pay the remainder of the balance. I was cautioned that paying online could take 1 to 2 weeks to clear the card. Where in the heck did Walgreens come in to the picture? By the way, despite having a banner outside advertising Clipper cards, my Walgreens had no idea what I was talking about. They had to call the GM to call the Clipper people to figure out what was going on.

Fast forward, and now I'm commuting between Millbrae and San Francisco via Caltrain again. I just started at this company and they pay for Caltrain, so I link my Employee benefits clipper system to my clipper card - a process they made surprisingly simple which unsurprisingly completely F'ed up everything.

All of a sudden I can no longer add funds via my regular portal and have to go through the company portal - and get this, though I bought my employee-benefit-purchased monthly pass on Sept 4th, that was too late for September. So I had to go to - you guessed it - Walgreens to buy a monthly pass with cash for the card that could no longer be used online.

I'm hoping that it will work again in October... we will see.

I think a big part of the value of Clipper to Caltrain is to increase revenues from people who forget to tag off. You're looking at this from an engineering perspective, but not from the business perspective. Breakage is a huge revenue driver for many industries(think of gift cards), and a monopoly like Caltrain is a great fit for implementing a system like this.

This article doesn't even touch the horrible nature of Clipper. Here is a summary of some of the worst that I have experienced:

1 - Intentionally inconvenient autoloading of a monthly pass.- They will automatically charge your CC for this but it doesn't load onto your card unless you have tagged on AND off in the specified zones. The even more annoying part is that during the beta period you could just double tag (acts like a refund) at a single station and your monthly would show up.

2- Effectively bricking their own card and making $250 worth of mistaken charges.- This is by far the worst I have ever heard about in terms of Clipper fail. I had a two-zone monthly pass autoload setup. I changed it two a one-zone. The next period they charged me for BOTH passes. I asked them for a refund and apparently this PERMANENTLY blocks your card from ever obtaining the pass type that you were refunded for. I discovered this when I changed the autoload back to a two-zone monthly.... and they CHARGED my credit card the $126 but never gave me the pass. Clipper insisted that they never charged me and wanted me to "prove it." It took me somewhere around 5 hours of phone time to get refunds and I still had to buy a brand new clipper card. The mistakes were 100% clipper's fault and it permanently broke my card. I am still waiting for that refund... should have just had my credit card block the charges!

Having used Clipper a few times, I think an easy way to make it less annoying is to just have more card readers. All the stations I've seen have so few you have to scan the entire platform to look for one.

Overall, this is such a non-problem compared to things most people in SF have to deal with (i.e. street sweeping/parking)

If you can remember to scan when you get on (which doesn't fit the "normal" behavior of a paper ticket either) then you can remember to scan when you get off. It's no different than BART, the main difference is BART funnels you through an exit. If you have a round trip commute, then you are going to enter and exit at nearly the same points.

The smiling, fedora-wearing bloke in Boston MBTA marketing materials is named Charlie; the system's CharlieCard is named after him. The reference is to a 1949 song in which a man named Charlie is forever trapped on the subway because he has no money to pay the exit fare which was then in place (and was phased out in no small part due to this song).

Bottom line: this sort of thing has long been known to be a pain in the ass and it snagged me once: JR and other Japanese railways require you to ticket in and ticket out. This is probably because tickets to different destinations have different fares, and so the police can harangue you if you use a 140-yen ticket to take a 400-yen ride. My first train ride in Japan I lost my ticket and thought nothing of it, until I saw the machine wouldn't let me through.

I feel like it would be better to propose a solution than to just complain.

They charge zone to zone. In order to know what to charge you they have to know your end point. How do you propose they figure this out without you telling them?

You outlined the problem:

> The system expects me to remember to tap, because they (the engineers) needed a way to check where and when I get off the train. That’s fantastic, but this step doesn’t fit in my normal behavior, it doesn’t fit in my historical or expected train usage patterns. It baffles me as to why I should be tagging off; there is no logic to it, and from the user point of view, there is no need.

What is the solution? You cannot have barriers so that you tap in and out of stations, since lots of people buy tickets on the train. (I always wrongfully assumed that the clipper card worked like so: you tap in at the boarding station, and then hopefully you remember to tap out at the arrival station: if you forget you are charged a full fare unless you tap in again for your potential return journey, in which case it is simple business logic to connect dots.)

You've labelled this "an engineering problem" but you appear to have forgotten that engineers have constraints.

Clipper customer service has a problem out of the gate since they're just an intermediary--you're buying passes from CalTrain or Muni or one of the other participating agencies.

But still, Clipper could easily improve their part of the system:

* Put readers in train car vestibules so riders can tag on/off on the train. * Add more functionality to the readers so you can check current balance and see if the card is already in a tagged on state

Business issues:

* Find more retailers to handle their payments. Even better, install the add value machines at more stations--right now the only one I know if is at the 4th and King station, though I've heard they're also at Palo Alto and San Jose.

* Don't require monthly passes to tag on at all--no matter whatthe money is already paid and I doubt you can get a refund without, say, a doctor's note or similar.

I feel like I'm missing something. Caltrain charges different depending on where you get off or get on right? How would it know what to charge unless you tagged on/off at the particular stations?

If Caltrain has monthly passes for unlimited rides (I have no idea if they do or not), I agree swiping should not be necessary- especially since I think Muni's monthly pass allows you to just get on/off a train without swiping on the train itself (if the station doesn't have a turnstile).

This is a problem in London as well - most Tube stations have barriers but some of them don't and most DLR stations are barrier-less - so forgetting to tap costs you extra the next time round (ie for PAYG - passes are penalty-free).

A possible solution might be to have tap-in/out points within the train itself near the doors (possibly even small vending machines) - that avoids the insanity of rushing to tap-in / buy your ticket and getting charged extra if you forget to tap out - if you are at the door of a train and you can see a big, bold notice commanding you to tap out - it's hard to ignore that (you could, of course!).

EDIT: A counter-argument might be that it would create a blocking crowd near the "tap-point" when many people want to alight at a major station. Well, this can be avoided by having (a) a tap-point at all doors and in locations within the carriage and (b) accounting for tap-ins/outs correctly by determining your Clipper/Oyster state and the position of the train (ie if you tap-out in between stations, it means you'll alight at the next one).

That's kind of what they do for buses in Singapore.

What an absurd argument. You have to tag off when you leave a station because there is not a single flat far for the Caltrain service - same as on BART. The only difference is taht Caltrain stations are open and don't funnel you through time-wasting gates as you enter and exit. You may or may not interact with a conductor during your journey; the probability of meeting one (which involves almost zero effort from you) is proportional to the probability that people will abuse the voluntary fare payment system, and is much cheaper than installing the aforementioned gates at every Caltrain station.

If it's so easy to do better, I suspect an alternative (that works for people without smart phones) would have been mentioned in the post.

As it stands, it's just a matter of riders developing the tap-out habit.

Transit systems elsewhere have used this system. If you'd never become used to the old more casual system, you'd just always know to both tap-in, and remember to tap-out, or you'll be overcharged. If you'd been more used to, say, BART than CalTrain you'd also be better primed for the Clipper system: it works like the BART turnstiles, only without the clear physical barrier/reminder.

Sigh, I have a monthly pass, I tag once per month, then I don't worry any more.

One could go to turnstiles like bart where you have to 'ticket in' and 'ticket out', it will probably come to that.

One solution would be to have RFID readers scan for your card coming off the train but that opens up other issues.

If you are a gadget person, having an app on your phone which geo-fenced your ticket usage would be another option. Harder to do the verify on the train step if its too easily forged/spoofed.

I've used Caltrain+clipper quite a lot, the real issues is that there are no gates (no one forcing you to tag out), and not enough readers on busy stations. This is really an investment issue, and with Caltrain not having reliable funding from year to year, we should be glad you can even use clipper on it, because the old paper ticketing system sucked, and I've missed a lot of trains because of it.

While the tag-off system does suck, putting turnstiles at every station is probably not cost-effective. They only last so-long, are exposed to weather and abuse. Depending on the layout of each station, you could even need multiple sets of turnstiles for a single station. Turnstiles for the LA Metro cost $46 million for 387 turnstiles.

I don't understand why this is so complicated. Why is there a controller on the train checking tickets? In Tokyo and NYC, you just go through a turnstile after swiping your card. You swipe your card again when exiting at your destination station. I never thought it was that complicated.

I do find it a little amusing that he thinks that the engineers had any real say in the working of a system like this.

I more just wish these systems gave some sort of discount for taking the same path at the same time nearly every day.