The ORCA consortium has a survey asking users about their experiences using ORCA cards and the fare payment system. The survey is open until mid November. The Friday Roundtable column is for short, light, interactive topics, so this is an opportunity to ask readers the same question: how is your experience using ORCA cards and the fare payment system in general?
There are several aspects to consider. There’s tapping an ORCA card, or using a credit card with the new open-payment system for credit cards. Using the readers may be better or worse on Link, regular buses, RapidRide, or Sounder. There’s obtaining the card and refilling it, at a ticket vending machine (TVM), at the MyORCA.com website, or getting a card mailed to you. There’s customer service offices. There’s the fare structure, and free transfers. There’s the times you have to explain the system to visitors or occasional riders at the platform or bus stop when it’s not obvious to them. And probably many other things.
My two biggest issues with ORCA are the time it takes to register a tap, and paying for part of a pass with an e-purse.
When you hold an ORCA card to a reader, the second-generation system takes twice as long to register a tap than the previous system did. So on buses I either have to hold up the line behind me, or tap and leave and assume it will either beep while I’m walking away or it won’t beep and I’ll get a free ride.
The second issue is when you want to split a pass cost between e-purse and a credit card. I switched to e-purse during the pandemic, and back to a pass this year. In the past at TVMs I’ve been able to use the $60 e-purse value for partial payment for the $108 pass, and pay the rest by credit card. I’d then have to do a second credit-card payment to put $10 back into the e-purse for occasional surcharges, because it had no option to take just $50 out of the e-purse and leave the other $10.
This year when I went back to using passes, the TVM wouldn’t even do that. The e-purse option was disabled, so the only choices were credit card or cash. That’s presumably because the e-purse value wasn’t enough for the entire pass. I didn’t want to leave $60 in the e-purse unused forever, so I went to Metro’s customer service office to make the kind of payment split I wanted. It would be nice if the TVMs could do this.
What are your impressions of ORCA?
This is an open thread.
