A carnival of technology

I still don’t like the MARTA Breeze system, so I’m going to complain about it for a little bit. I’m sure I’ll have a new post about something ridiculous I bought or some goofy food I cooked in a day or two. I finally decided to buy a shaving brush and accessories, so I’ll probably post about that in a few days when it all arrives and I pitch my can of Barbasol.

I probably posted about this before, but Breeze sure does make it easy to lose fares. Monday was a holiday here in Los Estados Unidos de América (fun fact: your Spanish teacher probably taught you that the US is Estados Unidos, but the long name of Mexico is actually los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, and, as you know, we’re not Americanos in Spanish, since the rest of the continent takes Amerigo Vespucci’s name outside of this nation’s humble borders. So really we kind of messed things up by rebelling first and trying to take all the good names), and, unlike other federal holidays like Columbus Day, most everyone gets Memorial Day off. On most weeks I buy a seven-day pass on Monday. It costs $13, so it pays for itself in terms of single fares at 8 rides, the number I usually take in a week. This being a short week, I’ve been buying individual fares instead. The Breeze vending machines do not make this easy. In a particular transaction, you can purchase one fare, two fares, or ten fares. Even those with the patience to stand in front of the machine for five minutes, tapping cards and feeding in money, will find that the rides are still stored in pairs in the Breeze system. Your six rides will display as alternating one and zero remaining until finally genuinely exhausted. This is annoying enough on its own, but when combined with the dodgy transfer system, it becomes even more difficult to figure out what any particular tap really did.

When the Breeze system broke last week, MARTA, while trying to figure out how much money they lost, pulled out the datum that about 65% of daily riders use passes instead of buying individual fares. When I get off the train at North Springs and head for the bus, I don’t normally stop to tap my card at the gate at the entrance to the bus bay. The gate doesn’t require it for this direction (and can’t, since the magnetic card readers are only on the other side), I don’t want to bother, and an unlimited-ride pass allows a certain freedom in that it doesn’t matter whether any particular tap is a new ride or a continuation of an existing one. As for the other 35% of MARTA riders, I’m willing to bet that most of them, let’s say 85% for the sake of making things up, started their ride on a bus. The fare gates at the train stations no longer offer anything physical, so the magnetic bus-to-rail transfer card serves as the senseless proof that one paid to be on the bus parked inside a station you need to pay to enter. As such, the exit from train to bus is a mad rush of colliding into half-opened gates with no one tapping anything, and, when I don’t have a pass, I’m apt to forget the protocol and miss the tap necessary to pick up a transfer. I did so today, and I ended up paying an extra fare when I boarded the bus. Oops.

The buses are a daily reminder of how rough and incomplete this Breeze transition has been. There have been changes—the poor suckers who take MARTA to the airport now have to pay an extra 50¢ for a temporary card, and I think my stashed tokens are now officially only collectors items (whoops)—but it’s still a hybrid system. Buses accept Breeze cards (if the reader is working), but they don’t issue them. Handing over your exact change when you board earns you a magnetic swipe card or a tear-off transfer, instead, like it always has. The bus-to-rail transfer I got this evening also reminded me of how badly the magnetic card readers have been handled. Unlike the weekly and monthly passes issued after the new fare gates were installed, which replaced the old action shots of MARTA stuff happening with colorful ads extolling the virtues of smart cards, the bus-to-rail transfer cards have the same design they’ve had for years: a simple color coding for AM or PM, the words “Bus 2 Rail” and instructions to “Insert This End.” Back in the old days, passes and transfers were inserted into the front of the turnstiles, and, if you were lucky, your pass would come out the other end. It broke sometimes, but there was no way to screw it up. Everything was clearly labeled, and if you inserted the card face up and forward into a functional turnstile, it would let you in. The new magnetic card readers are open, like a credit card reader, and, though there’s a little picture showing you which way the stripe should go, this instruction presents a spatial relation puzzle that is not intuitive and can’t be solved as quickly. This, as well as the slow reaction of the gates, creates a jam any time a bus arrives. Busier stations have employees stationed at every entrance and exit, but the need for this is to me a sign of a broken system. Daily riders will eventually pick up the nuances through repetition, but it’s always going to be new to someone.

Breeze sucks. I dread the day when MARTA’s dream of replacing the current bus system comes to fruition.