Could the Compass Card rollout be as rocky as Chicago’s?

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Today was the first day the Compass Card was rolled out on the West Coast Express.

Even still, two years after the system was supposed to be up and running for transit users across Metro Vancouver, TransLink is still struggling to get it fully-implemented.

But things could actually be worse.

Two years ago, Chicago’s system was supposed to have been finished. Ventra is similar to the Compass Card and was designed by the same company, Cubic Transportation Systems.

“There were all sorts of problems. Thousands of people did not receive Ventra cards in the mail. They had trouble registering the cards online. Further, they had trouble adding value to the card so that they could use them,” says Jon Hilkevitch, the transportation reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

“For people who tapped their wallet, it was deducting fares from both the Ventra card and their personal credit card. So you were being double charged. People were exiting the front door of buses and their backpack would accidentally swipe against the reader and they would be charged again on the way out. It was a mess.”

He says the support offered by the San Diego-based company bordered on non-existent.

“Cubic did not staff its phone centres anywhere near adequately to the demand of people who had problems and questions. So you had people waiting for long periods, getting cut off by operators once they got on the line. It was not ready for prime time when it was rolled out.”

Delays on trains and buses themselves created massive line-ups as people waited their turn to board.

“Many of the problems centred around very slow processing times to get the Ventra card to work when you tap it on a fare box on a bus or turnstile at a train station. After all, this new system was designed in part to speed up boarding. That’s supposed to take a fraction of a second. Under the contract, that’s supposed to be a half-second maximum. And in the case of Ventra, especially early on, it was sometimes taking five, six, 10 seconds to board, and it added to the bus-bunching problem that we already had in Chicago,” says Hilkevitch.

The time it’s expected to take to “tap” out from a bus is one of the major hurdles still faced by TransLink and Cubic with the Compass Card.

“It got so bad [in Chicago] that the CTA (the transit authority) basically halted the transition from the old system to Ventra and refused to pay Cubic on the installments that were owed, until the problems were resolved,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, who has been on the transportation beat in the Windy City for more than 15 years.

Almost two years after it was supposed to be finished, Hilkevitch says most of the problems have finally been ironed out, but not all.

“There’s a Ventra app that was supposed to have been launched by now — a smartphone app — and the CTA and Cubic announced last month that it’s not ready. They’re aiming to release that in the fall.”

And no matter how it works from here on out, Hilkevitch says many have already passed judgement in the court of public opinion on a system they’ll have to deal with for the next decade.

“If you talk to many people, they don’t feel that it’s even as good as the old system. This is a contract that is over a half-billion dollars. There were cost overruns within the last year-and-a-half that increased the contract by about 15 per cent.

“Because all of Cubic’s software is proprietary, the CTA is locked into this contract with Cubic until about 2024 and they will have to continue to buy software upgrades and additional equipment from Cubic so it is a very expensive proposition.”