My plastic Charlie Card arrived in the mail today. This is the bold new venture of the MBTA, a reusable debit card of sorts that can open turnstiles and pay for buses with just a tap. This should be great news to people concerned about security (“thieves will steal my card with all that money on it”), conspiracy theorists (“the governments gonna use this chip in the card to track me”), and curmudgeonly types (“wait and see how this one’s going to flop”).
Personally, I’m not as negative as many commuters are regarding the T, and except for some occasional grumbles I appreciate having an effective public transit network. That being said somedays I feel the MBTA is a center of entropy. The 18-month process of installing the new turnstiles abd card readers has several examples of the MBTA creating chaos despite their best intentions.
- The new turnstiles were first installed at Airport station where vistors to our town could buy passes that didn’t work anywhere else on the system.
- Replacing reusable tokens with one-time use tickets and the inevitable piles of litter that ensued.
- Tickets have to be dipped down into the fareboxes on buses, slowing down the boarding process.
- Naming the new ticket after a satrical political protest song in the first place doesn’t bode well for confidence in the system.
Let’s hope the new plastic cards are the end of these types of problems for the T and not the source of a whole bunch of new ones.
To keep track of things I’ve added Charlie on the MBTA to the blogroll.
For a peek back to Charlie’s MTA, take a look at this sweet scan of an old system map I discovered through Universal Hub.