Get it while it’s free
The Breeze Bus visited the North Springs MARTA station today. It was a MARTA bus with a Breeze ad on the side in place and the front seats replaced with desks and stuff on the inside. There were several people at the gates into the bus bays hawking the breeze cards and getting people to step inside the bus to sign up and be educated as to just what this Breeze thing is all about. I think this is a good idea, since there’s a lot of confusion as to just how the Breeze cards are going to work and what they will cost, and I think bus riders are going to be hit the hardest with the new problems this system creates.
I’ve listed some of my gripes before, and I’m going to begin by reiterating one of those. It’s my understanding that Breeze cards will eventually be required for bus to rail transfers since otherwise MARTA would not be able to eliminate the magnetic card readers at the stations. Maybe the deployment of this Breeze Bus at the train stations will be enough to get a free card to everyone who needs one, but it won’t be perfect. Cards will be lost or forgotten, new people will start riding MARTA unaware of any of this Breeze stuff, and they’re going to have to pay 50¢ for a paper card when they board the bus. The buses don’t give change, and the fare is $1.75 to start with, so this is going to end up as three dollars for a lot of people. If the cards were just 25¢ I wouldn’t mind the idea nearly as much.
Besides the cost, Breeze cards just don’t work nearly as well in the bus as at the train stations. The card reader is being shaken around all day, which has often been a problem for the magnetic card readers, but the magnetic cards at least said what they were on the front. You could just show the card to the driver and avoid swiping it in a broken reader, but the Breeze cards can hold anything. Besides the rough environment the card reader lives in, it has to maintain some kind of connection to whatever databases hold the card information (I’m pretty sure that these cards just have an RFID chip and don’t hold any actual information as I don’t believe the technology exists for a system like this to write to a card through the air), and since the buses are going to be spending their time speeding through the middle of nowhere, that connection isn’t going to stay up all the time. I’ve had several problems myself with the bus being unable to read my card, but so far I haven’t run into a driver cared. That can’t last forever.
In all, Breeze really doesn’t benefit bus riders. If it’s ever required to tap your Breeze card to exit a train station, there’s at least some hope that MARTA will use this data to make appropriate scheduling decisions and not run four-car trains during rush hour, but bus riders are basically untracked unless they end their trip at a station.
Speaking of tapping to exit, there was another change at the North Springs station tonight: the gates between the bus bay and the train station were closed. Unless they really are starting to track rider movements, I have no idea why. The bus bay at North Springs is inside the fare gates, so it usually makes sense to have the bus gates open to facilitate easy movement when a rush people coming off a train or a bus tries to squeeze through. I don’t know if tapping the cards was actually required or people were just trying out the new cards they got from the Breeze Bus, but there was a bit of a backup at the gates as people were running into another problem with Breeze—the first reaction is more often to try swiping the card through the familiar magnetic readers than tapping it against the Breeze logo—and the Breeze attendants were all busy handing out new cards and unable to guide people through the gates. I don’t know if this will be solved by the removal of the magnetic readers or if people will just be completely lost. However it eventually turns out, tonight was pretty annoying.
Lastly, there are some privacy concerns with tapping to exit. MARTA no longer wants anonymous riders, and, though I guess this isn’t a huge concern for someone who pays for lunch with a credit card, I’d at least like to know exactly what data MARTA stores from the Breeze card system and for how long.