Yesterday morning as we mourned the passing of a major contributor to the culture of Boston and the T, I woke up to a rather irritated torrent of commuters, all of whom where having issues with their monthly passes because apparently the entire fare payment system falls to its knees the first of every month. I’ve seen reports sprinkled here and there are several people commenting on this post over at Universal Hub quoting MBTA workers as saying that this is a result of the system being overloaded from having to update hundreds of thousands of cards all at once, a further result of people not staggering their purchases of monthly passes for their CharlieCards.
One thing I’d like to promote is the use of a service the MBTA has offered since July: online purchase of one-time fare additions and various passes, including the essential Monthly LinkPass.
General ignorance would suggest that people believe the passes can only be purchased during the month of the pass and not in advance. One can actually buy a pass for the upcoming month and there are station announcements regularly to advertise the availability of the following monthly pass. In fact, CharlieCards have the capacity to hold two simultaneous passes (current month and upcoming month after the 15th of the current) as well as regular fare.
I won’t reproduce all the benefits of the CharlieCard Web Programme here since they’re available on the site, but one particularly compelling feature is the ability to set up a monthly purchase option for your registered CharlieCards. This will bill you monthly to put the pass of your choice on your card and the following day, your card will quietly update itself at the fare gate. You can also report lost/stolen cards to secure the current balance/passes on the card and transfer it to a new one.
At the moment, online purchase of monthly passes is not available, likely due to the problems the MBTA was experiencing earlier today with their electronic payment system. Hopefully this will be available again soon.
I might just start plastering the stations I frequent with posters about the online payment program; there’s nothing that irks me more than people complaining about things that are otherwise avoidable…
I’ve become very active on Twitter as a result of my adding an MBTA search column to my TweetDeck apps on my computers and phone and subsequently replying to each and every irate commuter who shows up with a tweet in that column.
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