Take heed, CTA and Pace riders. An announcement is coming by the end of March on plans to make Ventra those transit agencies' sole fare-payment system, a move that has been delayed for months by numerous technical glitches and bumpy customer service.
The move away from non-Ventra payment options will occur in phases, officials said. First, riders will no longer be able to reload value onto the old fare cards, then the sale of magnetic stripe cards will be halted, and lastly, none of the old-style cards will be accepted on buses or trains, the CTA said. A deadline for transferring remaining value from the old cards to Ventra cards will also be set.
"Some final details are being worked out on setting up informational events and the mail-in program so customers can transfer balances from their old cards to Ventra, but we're pretty sure an announcement will be made by month's end," CTA spokesman Brian Steele said Friday.
CTA officials first hit the reset button late last year. At the time, they expected to reschedule the phaseout of the trusty magnetic stripe card, Chicago Card and Chicago Card Plus from the original mid-December target to late February or early March.
But the transit agency has proceeded with an abundance of caution, in the wake of the rocky Ventra launch in August and September and assorted, if less frequent, hiccups more recently. Ventra is now used in about 4 of every 5 CTA fare payments.
The initial problems ranged from difficulties activating Ventra cards to riders being double-charged when they tapped Ventra cards on fare readers. More recent setbacks have included scattered outages of Ventra mobile readers on buses as well as issues with rider attempts to hit the sweet spot on the readers when Ventra cards are tapped.
In addition, some bus drivers are allegedly displaying a lackadaisical attitude when Ventra customers tap multiple times and do not receive the green "Go'' screen on the reader.
It has prompted the CTA to recently issue a new fares bulletin - titled "Excessive Mobile Validator Touching" - to drivers and rail system employees, reminding them to assist customers.
"Employees should direct customers to cease repeatedly touching their cards to the mobile validator" and wait until one of an assortment of recently updated messages is displayed on the screen, the bulletin said.
The new messages replace "Stop,'' which didn't provide any information beyond a failure to collect the fare.
The new instructions include "Please touch again - Card not read"; "Stop - Insufficient fare," referring to not enough value on the account; and "Stop - Card/ticket expired,'' signaling the card is invalid.
As the result of "field observations'' conducted by supervisors, the CTA has slapped three bus drivers with procedural violations for failing to help customers who attempted to tap their Ventra cards multiple times, Steele said.
"In one case, a customer had spent more than a minute, possibly two minutes, tapping and the bus operator did not say anything to the individual,'' he said. "This is not a Ventra issue. It is really about an employee training issue. We expect our employees to be helpful to customers.''
An official with the CTA bus drivers' union said the CTA discipline is unwarranted.
"This makes no sense since the Ventra card is supposed to have a safety mechanism to prevent fare overcharges,'' said Herbert Kwilinski, an assistant to the trustees of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241.
"The CTA is making the bus operators the whipping boy for what the customer does,'' Kwilinski said.
Once this month's Ventra announcement is made, CTA customers who haven't yet made the switch to Ventra will have "at least a month" to do so before their old cards are deactivated and access is cut off to any remaining balances on the old cards, officials said.
CTA President Forrest Claypool slowed down the phaseout of the old fare cards in October, and the next month he indefinitely postponed it, after a series of meltdowns by Cubic Transportation Systems Inc. The company in 2011 was awarded an almost half-billion-dollar contract by the CTA to develop and operate the Ventra fare system.
From the get-go, Ventra was overwhelmed with technical glitches and, making matters worse, Cubic virtually shot itself in the foot by flubbing customer service, Claypool said. He announced in early November that the company would not start receiving payment from the transit agency until performance improved.
As of March 1, Ventra was used to pay 81 percent of fares on the CTA system, according to the latest update provided Friday. There are about 1.5 million active Ventra accounts.
And Ventra fare-processing times, or tap times, which are linked to how quickly riders board buses and trains, have improved significantly since last fall, when the volume of Ventra customers overwhelmed the Ventra system. Since then, numerous upgrades to software and hardware have been made.
Bus processing times now average 0.77 seconds, which still exceeds the half-second or less tap time stipulated in the Ventra contract.
Rail tap times are now averaging 0.49 seconds, the CTA reported Friday.
The latest data also show that the Ventra system is operating more than 99 percent of the time, and that response times at Ventra's customer call centers are meeting the standards outlined in the contract, officials said.
In mid-February, the CTA began to pay Cubic retroactively the per-tap fees - 4.4 cents per full-fare ride using a Ventra card, an extra 2 cents if a transfer is made and a penny more for a second transfer - agreed to under the contract.
But the CTA still hasn't started paying Cubic the $2.5 million per month base fee, totaling $30 million annually over 10 years, that's part of the $454 million contract.
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