Charlie is coming to Davis Square

[ron_newman]

This morning, all of the turnstiles have been removed from the Davis Square T station. Everyone has to walk in and out of one rather narrow gate, dropping a token or change into the box or showing your pass to the attendant.

Comments

[iamcoreyd.livejournal.com]

Now I can't just throw a bunch of nickles in the till :(

[myselftheliar.livejournal.com]

Yay! I think charlie passes are great and (once EVERYWHERE actually has them) a much easier method of travel. However I know how crap it is to show up at a station with a charlie ticket when it wants tokens

[ron_newman]

Oh, probably. Even pennies -- not like anyone is going to count your change ...

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Funny, I'd rather use a token any day. The cards are too easily destroyed in my lifestyle and the paper waste for single 1-2 ride passes is absurd.
However the benefits for the T include better tracking of usage (they still can't see where you get off but if you buy a multi ride pass the T can see when you get on again giving them better usage models) and more pricing options later on.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

The thing that bugs me is that I can into a turnstile station much faster than a Charlie station. There are more entrances, and I can walk through them more quickly. With the Charlie tickets I need to stop and wait for the doors to open.

[shinxy.livejournal.com]

It creates less paper waste if people keep adding fares to a single ticket they keep in their wallets, for example, but because not every station uses the system and it's new, people end up throwing them out.

I've been keeping a ticket for when they do finally bring Charlieticket up and running in Davis.

[ron_newman]

If you add money to a ticket, do you get the same ticket back, or does it eat the old ticket and spit out a new one?

(I'm a monthly-pass user so I haven't had a chance to play with stored-value tickets yet.)

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

My secret theory is that the main benefit for the T is that tokens now have a fixed value, so they don't get these extant liabilities that increase whenever they raise the fare.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

It's the Tet Offensive of 2006! Yay no more having to use two different forms of fares on every commute!

[prog.livejournal.com]

Other than the personal warmth that comes with feeling like a recycler, there is zero incentive to not throw your empty ticket in the trash (or on the floor), since it's a net loss for the customer to go through the effort of putting dead ticket + money in, versus just putting money in and getting a fresh ticket. I've seen perfectly respectable-looking people literally toss empty tickets over their shoulders, and you've seen them littering station floors across the city.

(And anyway, I'm not sure what happens to the tickets after you "add value" to them; I suspect that you get a new one and the old one is shredded and landfill-bound. If it's actually recycled I'd love to hear it.)

Why didn't they do like other cities' subways and have the turnstiles eat up empty tickets? I don't know.

[spatch]

I like how they're painting the concrete in the Davis station. I mean, what with all its problems -- broken escalators, leaking ceilings, fire alarms that may or may not be in use -- it's nice to see that the T thinks the highest priority right now, besides installing the Charlie Card machines, is to put a coat of industrial gray paint over concrete that's been around for nearly 25 years now without needing a coat of paint before.

Bravo!

[ron_newman]

I'd settle for having enough lighting on the benches so I don't have to carefully pick a seat where I can see well enough to do the daily crossword.

[ron_newman]

That's coming early next year and will be called CharlieCard. The fare increase proposal depends heavily on it. What you're using right now is CharlieTicket.

[spatch]

Maybe more light will bounce off the gray paint for you! It's a brilliant move on the T's part that way: indirect lighting at its most ludicrous.

[damsel-ophelia.livejournal.com]

Yup! And let's not forget to mention the fun that many passengers in the station have when they get nauseous from the paint fumes!

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

Ooh, then I'm looking forward to this CharlieCard.

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

My theory on the escalators (actually it was my friend's theory, but I'm stealing it from him) is that they're one part short in one of the escalators, so they just rotate which one is broken every day. Grrr.

[komos.livejournal.com]

I suspect it has more to do with the fact that the T didn't include unsatisfactory performance penalties into their most recent vertical transport maintenance contract in order to "save money."

So go figure... Alewife has a spanky new exterior surveilance system (complete with a big screen TV so the public can see who's coming) and those groovy Charlie ticket turnstyles, but yesterday the two longest escalators were out of service.

[ron_newman]

Sounds like you've got the solution right there -- the T should provide an incentive to turn in the zero-value ticket. Even a five-cent value would be enough to quickly get rid of all the ticket trash, just as it does for soda bottles and cans.

[ron_newman]

I can't remember the last time I encountered a broken escalator at a department store or a mall. They are doing something right that the T is doing wrong.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Now that's a subject line to strike fear into the hearts of the brave :( How depressing.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

Bingo! If there's no incentive why would I bother saving a PAPER ticket? They're so flimsy anyway.

The thing I liked about tokens was that you could theoretically "stock up" if a fare increase seemed imminent. I know of one guy who bought a kajillion tokens back when they were 85-cents before they upped it to a buck. He's been getting a discount until he just ran out, last month.

Now, with CharlieTickets this neat little loophole in fare increases is gone forever.

[ron_newman]

From time to time, New York City would redesign its tokens to prevent this. Boston never did, though.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

Cool! I still have an old "bullseye" token kicking around the house from my first trip to NYC!

I think there would be more contentment, less griping and less angst if the MBTA would just get its act together and cover the basics: enough trains to accomodate passengers on a decent schedule, safety, accessibility. The CharlieCard/Ticket is cool and all but when I am packed in like a sardine day in and day out those 3 seconds of subway entry convenience sort of move to the back of my brain, yanno?

[watchamacallit.livejournal.com]

MBTA just added recycling bins for the used tickets at Sullivcan Station. The mess of trash was getting ridiculous.