Families that live locally should already have youth Clipper cards for their children, especially since most (all?) transit agencies offer a youth discount — 50% off BART. “Unreasonably difficult” applies to visitors and those who have failed to plan.
I don't live locally, I live in Sacramento and come to the Bay Area every few months with my kids and we take transportation. We know how to do this, but it relies on having multiple cards and devices and keeping track of how much money is on each one, and it's absolutely turning off visitors.
I don’t disagree that it causes awkward problems at the fare gates, and may discourage some people/families from riding. System-wide though, the problems that allowing multiple taps would cause would be a much bigger headache for BART as a whole, because the vast majority of riders are alone.
If you can think of a way to allow deliberate multiple taps without allowing mistaken taps or requiring a station agent to come over and help, I’d love to hear it (and so would BART, I expect).
My kid got a Clipper Card as a 5th birthday present. However, Clipper needs to make it easier to get youth cards. I think it took 4-6 weeks to get ours via a complicated by-mail process.
I just remembered: the stupidest thing that was my kid's account couldn't use my email address or be attached to my accounts. A 5-year-old kid does not have their own email address! Was able to create an alias, but seriously.
Wait, you can’t register your kid’s Clipper card on your own account?
When I couldn't add a kid's Clipper card, I called customer service and was told to create a new account. I couldn't use my existing email address on that account, so I had to create an email alias. The kid's account bills to my credit card, but it's still a separate account. @bart.gov
One of the great improvements that will soon launch with the Next Generation of Clipper is to (finally) be able to manage family members within your account. We don't have a launch date yet. It is in testing now.
That’s so dumb, you should be able to have different kinds of cards on the same account. That makes managing a family’s worth of cards that much harder. 🙄
This is what I was talking about: nothing about BART or Clipper suggests that they ever intended for families to use the system. It is only SLIGHTLY better than the old paper cards where you had to send your six year old through on their own and hope they pulled out the card on the other side.
The blame here is largely to be placed on Cubic, which is the vendor selected by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (the multi-county agency responsible for coordination between transit agencies). Cubic has been a horrible partner since original Clipper and now Clipper 2.0 testing.
“BART’s General Manager Bob Powers, who also chairs the Clipper Executive Board, told Cubic that they had “zero credibility,” as this was the third meeting that the timeline had been pushed back.” thevoicesf.org/bay-area-tra... It’s been bad.
My son has a clipper card. He wanted to take a trip with a friend and said “he can just use my card - we’ll tap twice”. I told him that isn’t allowed. He asked why. All I could do was shrug. Any system that is complicated for new users is a bad system. It’s the new ones you want!
The “why” is almost entirely to prevent double charges (at all agencies), but also to allow the free transfer process to work (at agencies like Muni with unlimited transfers within a set time). The only reasonable way to allow multiple charges on one card would require manual intervention by agent.
If you could tap again to charge 2nd fare, the error rate would be astronomical: “I didn’t hear the beep so I did it again”, “I don’t know how to tap so I do a weird jerky motion and tapped twice” etc. Also, it would mean there would be no way to allow you to transfer for free to another vehicle.
Except other cities do this. BART's system is dumb.
Really? I’ve visited a few cities in the US that use prepaid cards and have run into similar limitations. If you can think of any examples, I’d love to look into how they do it so I can suggest similar methods to Muni while they’re struggling with the Clipper vendor Cubic who’s stuck in 2002.