High-Tech Bus Fare Collection System Being Tested

Fumbling for change on crowded, lurching buses could be a thing of the past for more than a million Southern California commuters if a high-tech fare collection experiment announced Thursday is successful.

The three-month experiment allows suburban bus riders in the Foothill Transit District and the Culver City and Montebello municipal bus lines to purchase electronic fare cards that are debited each time a passenger boards a bus.

“They don’t have to stand there and dig through their pockets and try to come up with loose change,” said Andrea Greene, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which funded the experiment with $4.6 million in state money.

If the test is successful, MTA officials will consider instituting the debit card system for the more than 1.3 million daily riders of the MTA’s buses and trains.

“This is the wave of the future,” Greene predicted.

The cost to expand the debit card system throughout the MTA’s vast three-county district would be about $30 million, say transit officials, but millions of dollars would be saved every year that are currently lost to counterfeited bus passes.

The debit cards are extremely difficult to counterfeit because each one carries an identification number and the purchase cost on electronic tape, similar to stripes on the backs of commercial credit cards, officials said.

If a card is lost or stolen, it can be reported to transit officials, who can invalidate the card from a central computer.

The fare cards can be purchased for any amount. Upon boarding a bus, the passenger inserts the card into a slot next to the old-style coin box and the fare is deducted from the amount coded on the magnetic tape. An electronic window flashes the amount of fare left on the card each time it is used. When that amount is as low as $10, the figure is automatically printed on the card to alert the commuter.

Such cards have been in use for years on commuter rail lines such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco, but MTA officials say that only New York City has instituted an electronic debit system for buses.