Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards

New submitter johnslater writes "The Chicago Transit Authority's new 'Ventra' stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million."

$454 million??

[I'm New Around Here]

For that amount, they could have failed at health care for most of the country. How does one city get that far lost?

Re:What's wrong with Tokens?

[runeghost]

Well-connected corporations don't get paid hundreds of millions for existing, functional systems.

Re:What's wrong with Tokens?

[DarkOx]

The old fashion subway token produces little meta-data the NSA can use to track your every move.

Re:What's wrong with Tokens?

[Solandri]

The Chicago Transit Authority provided 620 million rides [wikipedia.org] in 2011. A $454 million system thus represents a cost of just 7 cents per ride over 10 years, compared to the typical $2-$5 fare per ride. I think the vast majority of public transport riders would say an extra 7 cents per ride is worth it for the convenience of a card which they can buy/refill online vs tokens they have to stand in line to buy. Even if the average rider has to fumble around just 10 seconds per trip to buy a token, that represents over two hours per person in lost time each year, and a staggering 196 man-years lost each year for the entire city.

Re:What's wrong with Tokens?

[Anonymous Coward]

They used to call me paranoid, but not anymore

I swear, that has got to be the very theme for the American IT industry over the last 20 years. We spent the late 1980s and early 1990s dreaming up all kinds of crazy tinfoil-hat paranoid scifi bullshit. And then many of us all got jobs implementing that crazy tinfoil-hat paranoid scifi bullshit, because the whole thing that made it believable, good paranoid scifi bullshit, was "hey, this is theoretically actually possible to do."

Re:Could this be streamlined?

[scamper_22]

What's interesting is the question on why public transit is viewed so differently than other public functions.

I'm in Canada. Land of public healthcare. We cannot charge people to see a doctor or anything like that.

Ditto for public education.

Yet, even in Canada, transit remains that elusive thing that while it is publicly run and subsidized, it is 'unthinkable' that people shouldn't pay for it.
This is even true of roads, with increasing calls for more tolls to make drivers pay...

For the life of me, I cannot fathom why we treat public infrastructure (like roads and mass transit) so much differently than we do healthcare and education.

Yes, there are various nuances. Things like making sure people don't overuse or congest the system. Of course you could just as easily make that argument for healthcare :P But I think the overwhelming argument is simply that transit is not viewed on the same social level as healthcare or education despite the fact that transit is something we used every single day in and out... and quite frankly relative to the size of government budgets, transit itself is fairly inexpensive.

I laugh with despair when my home province of Ontario spends like 40% of its budget on healthcare, throws billions and billions into education... then people fight and squabble over a hundred million here or there with transit.

It's ridiculous quite frankly.

Re:What's wrong with Tokens?

[camperdave]

Tokens are not easy to use. Not for the passenger, and not for the transit company. Passengers are forced to dig through pockets, or change purses to try to find a token. You have to go to special stores to get them, If you drop them they get lost easily, especially in the snow or mud. Transit companies have to have an entire network of collection boxes, personnel, and special vehicles to transport the tokens to a central facility, where the are counted, cleaned, filtered for damaged tokens and counterfeits, and packaged for distribution to the vendors.

Tokens are easy to understand. Tokens are durable, and they beat the heck out of cash fares... but it's far easier to swipe a card or bump and RFID reader.