Charlie can kiss my ass

This morning, all but two of the shiny new turnstiles at the Malden Center Orange Line station were set to "smart cards only".

Smart cards have only been distributed for the past week or so, and aren't going to hit major active use until January when they replace T Passes. So how is it that somebody thought there'd be such a dramatic increase in usage of them that it was necessary to devote the majority of the turnstiles to "smart cards only"? At rush hour!

This might all be fine if the T was being wildly innovative and blazing some kind of turnstile trail, but come on-- this isn't rocket science. This rollout has been piss-poorly handled. (Hey! looky our new cards and tickets! Oh, but a ticket isn't a card. And you can't use tickets at stations that aren't equipped with the new gates, but you can use cards like a pass. Oh, unless the gate says "smart cards only" in which case you need this plastic card that looks identical to the paper card. And you can just add more money to them in that convenient kiosk over there. What's that? Oh, see, it says "Transaction Cancelled", so you didn't get charged. What's that? You did? Oh. I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that.)

Comments

[jennifer]

I'm sorry, but nothing that the MBTA does surprises me anymore. Once at the Harvard T stop all of the t token machines were broken, but only one had an out of order sign on it. I watched for at least 5 minutes as person after person tried to get one of the out of order (but no sign) machines to work before realizing it didn't and then getting in the super long token line. Oh, and a T employee was standing at the booth chatting and could see all these people wasting their time at broken machines. Hello! Quit your chatting and post some more signs! I could go on. Everytime I ride the T, which is all the time, I see some kind of lame thing.

What I want to know about the cards is why they don't print how much money you have left on them?

[J]

The machines arent set to only accept cards, it just means the ticket slot has been jammed. Instead of shutting the whole gate down, they still allow people with cards to use it.

[BStu]

I think I was there that day, too. There have been a few other instances where all of the turnstiles (or whatever they are called now that they aren't turnstiles) where set to "Smart Card" only. Which is really great since they are marketing them as "Charlie Cards" not "Smart Cards". I'm sure it was due to jams or something, but that hardly excuses having the entire station inaccessible.