The man who never retruned

[prog]

I found a blog about the T: http://www.badtransit.com/ I have been learning a lot about the whole Charlie business through it. The RFID-bearing Charlie Cards sound cool and I look forward to seeing how they work, but... everything so far as been handled so short-sightedly that I kind of dread it too.

I also imagine I am not the first one to find irony in the fact that this new fare system is named after the tall tale of a man who was so screwed by a crappy mass-transit UI that he could not even figure out how to leave his subway car, and so never saw his home again. I thought the name choice was clever and charming at first but now it just reeks of unfortunate appropriateness.

Comments

[mangosteen]

If I was to choose one overarching thing that really gave me a massive metaphorical wedgie about the whole CharlieCard system, it's that MBTA learned nothing from any other transit system's experience with fare card systems.

To wit, with a card-on-demand system, they could have done away with monthly and weekly passes, and gone to n-day (i.e. 7, 30, etc.) passes instead.

Also, I have no idea why they're adding penalty fares to non-pass holders, but that's a rant for another day.