The Bay Area’s transition to the new Clipper fare payment system continues to be rocky for some transit riders and agencies, which included three outages last month.
On Monday, the Clipper executive board received an update on the rollout of Clipper 2.0 from executives from Cubic Transportation Systems, the vendor in charge of the migration to the new fare payment system. The presentation included a list of recent outages and a multitude of issues that still need to be resolved before resuming the bulk migration of Clipper accounts to the new system.
Cynthia Eng, vice president and senior manager, with Cubic, said that while Clipper 2.0 is live and progress continues addressing issues with the migration, some riders, frontline staff, and transit agencies have had experiences that they did not expect to have during the transition.
“We take that very seriously, Eng told the board. “Our focus remains on resolving those issues, improving the customer experience and supporting a seamless transition.”
In what was supposed to take eight to 12 weeks to transition from Clipper cards to Clipper 2.0, nearly 1.3 million Clipper cards have been migrated to the new system as of last week, according to Angus Davol, the assistant director for Clipper development and budget at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
Cubic is targeting May 30 to start the bulk migration of accounts after addressing issues with the new system, but gave no timeline on when the migration would be completed.
At the board meeting, Cubic also shared recent incidents with the new system since its launch on Dec. 10 last year. Last month, there were three separate outages. The first outage took place on March 7 that lasted nearly 13 hours, during which fare inspection devices were not working properly and customers were unable to access accounts on the website and app.
Another outage occurred on March 21 that lasted for an hour. During the outage customer service agents were unable to access customer accounts. A third outage, lasting nearly four hours, took place on March 27. In that outage, there were issues with vending machines and customers were unable to make purchases.
BART General Manager Bob Powers said that instead of listing the outages, he wanted to see more analysis of each outage and how Cubic planned to prevent them from happening again. There had been at least one incident a month since the launch of Clipper 2.0.
“They’re impacting my riders,” Powers said, “I want to know what the meat themes are and what steps were taken, so we don’t do it in April.”
Other issues that have plagued the new system include issues with ticket vending machines, fare inspection devices and problems with mobile wallets.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Citizens Advisory Committee on Thursday will receive a Clipper 2.0 presentation from Diana Hammons, the agency’s director of revenue development and reporting.
