I have made my wife excited about ORCA by getting her a card and putting a bit of money on it. Instead of having to buy annoying little tickets all the time, she can just swipe her purse by the scanner, and she’s done. They even let her board free once or twice because the scanner was broken. She loves it.
However, her work just gave her a new stack of “Commuter Checks”. These are a benefit from her work to partially subsidize bus travel. But her administrator told her that she can’t use them for ORCA.
Confused, I called King County Metro to get the scoop. Apparently they have no way of keeping people from putting money in their e-purse using the Commuter Checks, then pulling real money back out of their ORCA cards. So in the end, my wife has to go back to the annoying little tickets.
One more thing. They’re planning on getting rid of the annoying little tickets. Asking the KC representative how they’ll deal with Commuter Checks then, he said he doesn’t think they’ve figured that out yet.
Yeah, there are definitely some hiccups. UW gives similar tickets to new employees, and I think they’re doing something similar for a new “U-Powered” program for bike commuters. The day passes are paper for now too. I’ve got to think they will work in some sort of non-refundable amount at some point.
I wasn’t aware you could pull real money out of your e-purse once deposited. I don’t much see the point in this feature, particularly as it’s already raising problems. But, it’s already in place.
From a programming standpoint, then, it shouldn’t be too difficult for them to rig up the e-purse so that money added via Commuter Checks are “tabbed” as irretractable. So, if you add $50 of your own money and $70 in Commuter Checks, you can pull out up to $50 off of your card, but that $70 is staying on there.
My thoughts exactly – it’s just a database. Of course, getting the right people who know what they’re doing to fix the issue may be difficult, considering the size of the bureaucracy.