Bus Transfer System Gets 1-Way Ticket Out of Orange County

Bus drivers know how much trouble a little piece of paper can cause. Told his bus transfer was no good, one Orange County rider pulled a plant out of the ground and shattered a bus window.

The incident--while extreme--was hardly shocking.

“People get very, very, very angry,” said Lt. Dan Jarvis, who heads the Orange County Sheriff Department’s transit police division.

No more. Or at least not for the same reasons. In a move hailed by the men and women who drive the county’s buses, the Orange County Transportation Authority last summer banished transfers and switched to a day-pass system.

The verdict? Transit police say they have seen an 80% to 90% reduction in incidents. The once daily calls from drivers needing assistance with disgruntled customers have largely ended.

“We’ve pretty much eliminated an entire column of statistics we had to keep,” said Jarvis, who added that the reduction in disputes has freed up officers to patrol more buses.

The county’s decision to eliminate transfers and switch to day passes makes the agency one of the few, but growing, number of U.S. public transportation systems to do so.

The benefits are clear: no more arguments over months-old transfers, transfers that couldn’t be used in the direction the passenger wanted to go, or ones that had expired 15 minutes beforehand.

But in some big cities, the solution to transfer hassles may not be as simple as it would seem.

In Los Angeles, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials say they have grappled for years with a way to automate their system. While the authority plans a $70-million overhaul of the fare collection system in the next few years, the trouble with transfers has been serious enough to prompt officials to ask for a temporary solution until then; machines capable of printing the slips on board, thus eliminating the chance for human error.

That request, however, was rejected recently by the transit board members.

“Transfers have been an ongoing concern for several years,” said Steve Lantz, the MTA planning director responsible for implementing a universal fare system.

Sometimes that concern becomes a serious threat. This month, an MTA driver allegedly was assaulted and spit on by a passenger after he refused to give the man a free transfer. A two-inch cut above the driver’s eye may require plastic surgery, MTA spokesman Ed Scannell said.

Scannell and others say transfers often are the target of thieves. The potential to rip off the bus system is ample. The MTA now prints more than 700,000 transfers daily of which only about 170,000 are sold to patrons.

“Each operator is given more than he or she will need because you never know exactly how many people will be riding the bus,” Scannell said. In addition, each transfer must still be manually punched by the driver, a pressure-filled task, especially in the hectic morning and afternoon rush hours.

A valid transfer is as good as cash, making what would otherwise be nearly worthless slips of paper the target of everything from theft to counterfeiting, say transit officials. At 50 cents a pop on the black market, a fraudulent or stolen transfer is worth the equivalent of $1.60 on Los Angeles-area buses.

A.J. Taylor, a project manager who handles transfers for the MTA, said they rank in the top five causes of problems for drivers. Said Taylor: “The drivers would prefer they go away.”

Officials from the Washington D.C.-based American Public Transportation Authority say how to best collect fares remains one of the top concerns of transit agencies nationwide.

“The collection of fares is an issue that does cause consternation,” said spokeswoman Rose Sheridan, adding that about a dozen regional bus systems have implemented day-pass systems, although not all have eliminated transfers.

In Chicago, transfers were automated with the use of magnetic strips, making them much more accurate. The first city of its size to switch to a universal fare system, transit officials in the Windy City say the changeover has been a resounding success.

“It really did do a lot for our operators,” said the Chicago Transit Authority’s Jeff Dolce. “Now they don’t have to worry about hassles. People would take transfers out of the trash, glue them back together. You name it. People used to walk up to side of the bus and grab a whole packet of transfers out of the pocket of the driver through the little window next to him.”

Dolce said the switch more than two years ago has saved the agency about $11 million a year in lost revenues from fare evasions, fraud or employee theft.

In Orange County, bus drivers say they are just glad to be rid of them. The paper transfers, they say, were a constant source of headaches.

“They’d always try to rip you off with them,” said Lorena Prickett, a 13-year transportation authority veteran. “People would try to use them to go back in the same direction, which was against the rules. One time, someone gave me a transfer that was eight months old and insisted it was good.”

With the new day pass, for $2.50 you can ride the bus anywhere in Orange County all day long. The basic bus fare remains $1 per trip. Under the old system, transfers were free. The new fares marked an increase for a majority of riders--those needing to take more than one bus on each leg of a round trip. The fare increase was the first in seven years.

Passengers still can pay the same $1. The passes are brightly colored, clearly marked for a specific date and, transit police say, difficult to replicate.

And the single-day passes have another benefit for drivers--they don’t have to handle them. Drivers worried for years about colds and germs on the transfers.

For driver Nate Henderson, the introduction of the day pass meant finally retiring his set of full-fingered gloves after two decades of wearing them behind the wheel.

“You just never knew where [transfers] had been,” Henderson said.