BART riders can’t use their Clipper “smart” cards on the AirBART shuttle because….
Regional transit officials say they sympathize with tired travelers who just want to use their cards, climb on the bus and catch their flights. But bureaucratic squabbles and abstruse coding make that unlikely ever to happen.
“Of course, it would be ever so much easier if a traveler headed to or from the airport could use a Clipper card,” said John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees Clipper cards. “It would make things a lot easier, a lot more customer-friendly.”
But don’t expect anything to change, Goodwin said.
“Doing that would require a lot more (computer) code to be written and would require a lot more money to be spent,” Goodwin said. In short, programmers would have to rewrite the BART fare program to run on a card reader designed for a bus. The original BART code can’t simply be loaded on a different type of reader, Goodwin said. He couldn’t give an estimate of how much it would cost.
So basically, BART can’t get reimbursed for Clipper trips that involve a bus? That is some unbelievably retarded programming. No doubt the persons in charge will get shit-canned, right?
If only BART ran in a part of the country where computer programmers were commonly found!
Have they said anything about what will happen once the peoplemover is in place?
I dont understand, couldnt AirBART just get counted like another bus agency, like the half dozen bus providers who use clipper already?
The problem is that Clipper (and probably a bunch of the other systems involveD) s a proprietary system.
If these were open-source systems, then yeah, BART could just hire a programmer or two and integrate everything. As it is it’s probably illegal to do so thanks to copyright law.