Comments on: MARTA MARTA MARTA! http://reallylongword.org/2006/10/marta-marta-marta/ Difference Engine Diary Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:52:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: dshea http://reallylongword.org/2006/10/marta-marta-marta/comment-page-1/#comment-53 dshea Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:44:05 +0000 http://www.reallylongword.org/?p=520#comment-53 <p>The individual rider tracking does kind of suck, but you can at least decouple it from your name by buying a card with cash (I don't know how long they keep credit card records or if they even link them to Breeze card numbers) and not signing up for the balance protection. MARTA has screwed around with bus routes and schedules twice in the past year or so, so maybe they are getting some use out of the data.</p><p>As far as bus riders, I think it's both better and worse than you think. Due to the spoke/hub setup of the routes around the stations, I think most riders are going to either start or end their bus trips at a rail station, and after the big Breeze push that preceded and followed the removal of the magstripe readers, most regular bus riders have Breeze cards. However, the buses don't sell Breeze tickets, so someone without a Breeze card that takes a bus to a rail station is going to have to pay a $1.75 fare on the bus and then $2.25 at the station for another fare and a Breeze ticket. This might not be a huge issue for commuters, but if anyone decides to take Amtrak to Atlanta and then use MARTA when they arrive, they're pretty much screwed.</p> The individual rider tracking does kind of suck, but you can at least decouple it from your name by buying a card with cash (I don’t know how long they keep credit card records or if they even link them to Breeze card numbers) and not signing up for the balance protection. MARTA has screwed around with bus routes and schedules twice in the past year or so, so maybe they are getting some use out of the data.

As far as bus riders, I think it’s both better and worse than you think. Due to the spoke/hub setup of the routes around the stations, I think most riders are going to either start or end their bus trips at a rail station, and after the big Breeze push that preceded and followed the removal of the magstripe readers, most regular bus riders have Breeze cards. However, the buses don’t sell Breeze tickets, so someone without a Breeze card that takes a bus to a rail station is going to have to pay a $1.75 fare on the bus and then $2.25 at the station for another fare and a Breeze ticket. This might not be a huge issue for commuters, but if anyone decides to take Amtrak to Atlanta and then use MARTA when they arrive, they’re pretty much screwed.

]]> By: AT http://reallylongword.org/2006/10/marta-marta-marta/comment-page-1/#comment-52 AT Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:36:15 +0000 http://www.reallylongword.org/?p=520#comment-52 <p>I found your blog entry through searching to see if the annoying and inefficient Breeze system has failed yet. I agree with all your criticisms and disagree with your one bit of praise: that its good that MARTA can now track individual riders. Perhaps I am paranoid but that in itself is a reason for me to never buy a Breeze card and always use the tix instead. MARTA appears to have raised its fares by $.50 (proabably covers only the cost of the Breeze tix media, which are more expensive than tokens and not reusable) without having anything to show for it except a bunch of possibly spurious (because of small sample-sizes) and probably unnecessary (because obvious) data to determine where they should add new routes or stations. And where that data might be most useful, in adding and rerouting buses because of the ongoing demographic changes in the city, riders typically pay with $1.75 cash and bypass Breeze entirely, so as to avoid the $.50 surcharge for Breeze. So now the system runs in segregation of buses and rails, too. Breeze might yield its data-mining benefits somewhere where mass transit ridership was already broad and established like in NYC - though I think there would be serious privacy issues then, too, which as I said is for me enough reason by itself to oppose such systems - but in a small, underfunded and poorly managed system like Atlanta's, Breeze seems a colossal waste of money and time.</p> I found your blog entry through searching to see if the annoying and inefficient Breeze system has failed yet. I agree with all your criticisms and disagree with your one bit of praise: that its good that MARTA can now track individual riders. Perhaps I am paranoid but that in itself is a reason for me to never buy a Breeze card and always use the tix instead. MARTA appears to have raised its fares by $.50 (proabably covers only the cost of the Breeze tix media, which are more expensive than tokens and not reusable) without having anything to show for it except a bunch of possibly spurious (because of small sample-sizes) and probably unnecessary (because obvious) data to determine where they should add new routes or stations. And where that data might be most useful, in adding and rerouting buses because of the ongoing demographic changes in the city, riders typically pay with $1.75 cash and bypass Breeze entirely, so as to avoid the $.50 surcharge for Breeze. So now the system runs in segregation of buses and rails, too. Breeze might yield its data-mining benefits somewhere where mass transit ridership was already broad and established like in NYC – though I think there would be serious privacy issues then, too, which as I said is for me enough reason by itself to oppose such systems – but in a small, underfunded and poorly managed system like Atlanta’s, Breeze seems a colossal waste of money and time.

]]> By: Anonymous http://reallylongword.org/2006/10/marta-marta-marta/comment-page-1/#comment-51 Anonymous Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:23:44 +0000 http://www.reallylongword.org/?p=520#comment-51 I LOVE MARTA! MARTA! MARTA! I LOVE MARTA! MARTA! MARTA!

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