Orphan Road

Catching up on my reading after a long, much needed vacation, and I see we're going to get treated to not one, but two bus fare hikes in the next couple of years.

I sort of wish there was more predictability to these fare increases, so they didn't seem to hit people off guard like this. But I guess you can't plan a budget that way, without knowing what your expenses are going to be.

While bus fares in Seattle are relatively cheap, compared to other cities, I think Metro should try and do something positive with the fare increase to give people the sense that their money is going somewhere besides fuel (which they can't see). Cleaner buses, for example. It doesn't have to be expensive, just something.

I'll have a transit-centric edition of the old "what I did on my Summer vacation" essay coming in the next few days.

I was working up a response to Matt Rosenberg's piece in Crosscut on buses, but Erica Barnett got there first and says what needed to be said.

A press release on KC Metro's website says:

By 2006, passengers will be able to easily transfer from one system to another without digging in their pockets for extra fares and tickets. It will just take a wave of a “smart card” embedded with a microchip that automatically calculates any fare due. The cards can be reloaded and used indefinitely, and will eliminate the current system of more than 300 types of tickets, passes and tokens.

Well, as you can see, it's 2008 and the fabled ORCA card is not here yet (and is probably a year or more away). What happened?

Well, KIRO says that the problem could be the contractor, ERG. ERG was recently fired by the city of Sydney, Australia, for completely failing to deliver a smart card for that city, after 5 years of delays.

ERG has pushed back hard, countersuing the city and arguing that it was bureaucratic disinterest and incompetence that doomed the project. The company also designed Hong Kong's Octopus Card, which by all accounts is incredible successful, so I wouldn't be so quick to put all the blame on them.

Neat post at Autopia comparing transit fares in major cities between 1952 and today. Seattle's still a pretty good deal.