TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

Ever since I arrived here in the San Francisco Bay Area a bit more than two years ago, I was quite amazed at how inconvenient and outdated the fare charge and collection systems here in the area seem to be. If I want to ride the bus, I have to pay the bus driver. I have to have exact change available or else I need to overpay (the fare is $1.75, so if I don’t carry any change with me, then I most certainly will have to pay $2, if I even have a couple of one dollar bills with me). What’s even more surprising is the unfairness of the fare system - one bus ride with VTA always costs the standard fare of $1.75 - no matter whether I only ride to the next stop or all the way from Eastridge in San Jose to Menlo Park on the 22 bus. Same price. And there are no transfers. So if I’m unlucky and my destination doesn’t happen to be on the same bus line, then I have to pay twice. And I won’t even talk about scheduling (or lack thereof) of connecting buses here …

But it gets worse. If I want to ride from my home to someplace in downtown San Francisco, I need three tickets. One on VTA, one for Caltrain and another one for Muni. There is no single fare system for the whole region - every operator collects its own fare. On my recent trip around the bay, I had to purchase 5 tickets:

• Caltrain for Mountain View to San Jose
• Amtrak for San Jose to Oakland
• A ticket for the Ferry Oakland to San Francisco
• Muni for San Francisco Ferry Building to Caltrain station
• Caltrain again for San Franciso to Mountain View

Nowaways, every major metropolitan area (and most of the smaller ones) in Switzerland has a zone-based fare system, where you pay one fare for one ticket from your origin to your destination, no matter how many different modes your trip will use or how many times you need to make a connection. It’s just one ticket. And the same applies for passes - dail, monthly or yearly (granted, the situation on monthly passes is slightly better even here - I think if you buy a monthly pass for Caltrain, you may use that pass for one connecting local fare on VTA or Muni as well).

Now, a while ago I heard about this big, expensive project called TransLink, that the MTC is working on. I thought - oh well, they will surely fix all this then. But it appears this is not the case - what is TransLink really?

How Does TransLink® Work ?
Say goodbye to fumbling for exact change, smoothing crumpled bills, and standing in line for a new pass or ticket book. The TransLink® smart card contains a microchip that can simultaneously keep track of value equivalent to cash, passes, and/or ticket books. One card, that’s it.

[TransLink® Home Page]

So TransLink is “just” a SmartCard that allows you to pay for all these tickets without using cash. And it can store your monthly pass and will automatically apply it. Granted, this IS an improvement over the current situation - but it doesn’t fix the bigger issue - you still have to buy tickets for every single segment of your trip. What’s really needed is a “Verkehrsverbund”-type organisation, just like they have in Germany and Switzerland. The whole Bay Area should be split up into a number of zones - and you’d buy tickets according to the number of zones you travel - irrespective of the number of train or bus segments involved. The “Verkehrsverbund” would collect the money and contract with the individual operators for their respective services and lines. But it doesn’t look like anything like this is going to happen anytime soon.