King County Metro loses $76K in one day due to glitch
Jun 13, 2016, 1:16 PM | Updated: 1:18 pm
Riders on many King County Metro buses were unable to use their bus cards recently after a glitch rendered card readers inoperable leading to approximately $76,400 in lost fares.
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About 60 percent of riders use ORCA cards to pay for their trips on Metro buses. The pre-paid cards are tapped on a reader when boarding the bus. But those readers weren’t operational on June 8. Riders were not barred from using the bus, however, and were allowed to ride free that day.
According to King County Metro, a “calendar error with a new ORCA data load schedule didn’t update with the current bus schedule data.” Basically, two different computer programs didn’t sync properly and they could not communicate. A total of 870 buses were reporting problems with their card readers before 7:30 a.m, however, a total of 1,000 buses reported some problem with the readers throughout the day. Metro has about 1,280 buses on the road each day.
About 46,000 riders — out of 522,000 estimated daily riders — were unable to tap their ORCA cards when boarding their buses, according to Metro. Lost fares add up to an upper estimate of $69,000 for Metro buses, and about $7,400 for Sound Transit routes. Train service was not affected.
About 60 percent of buses were fixed by 3 p.m. and 77 percent were fixed by 7 p.m. The remaining buses were tended to as they returned to their base that evening. A Metro spokesperson said that the estimated fare losses could come down as more data becomes available — some riders may have chosen to pay with cash since the readers were down.
Individual Metro buses have sometimes experienced broken or malfunctioning card readers in the past, the spokesperson said, but this is the first such incident where the problem was wide-spread.
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