RantWoman, as has already been established, is a bit of a nerd who spends a lot of time on the bus.
During today's bus travels RantWoman's mind wandered again to the recent King County fare enforcement officer report and to RantWoman's own experience riding around for more than a month with a demagnetized ORCA card, a card that only very occasionally produced the beep indicating that the card read properly when tapped.
Adventures of RantWoman: Reporting on the Metro Fare Enforcement misses a number of points.
(Please do not tell RantWoman about paying her fare on her phone. Between a white cane, a purse, and whatever baggage RantWoman is carrying, taking out a phone and waking it up to pay a fare is more than RantWoman even wants to attempt.)
RantWoman currently has a small couch on a cord around her neck but the whole time her card was not beeping, RantWoman was pulling the card out of somewhere and trying to tap it. RantWoman is white and bathes regularly so maybe drivers just believed her when she said she had a pass. Or sometimes, the imperatives to stay on schedule outweigh more detailed inquiry.
That entire time, RantWoman had in fact paid for avalid pass, online through the MyORCA app. At some point, possibly after RantWoman encounterd a fare enforcement officer, RantWoman followed directions on the back of the card and called an 800 number. RantWoman was referred to her local transit agency. The person RantWoman spoke to looked up the number of transactions which had registered for the previous month. It was substantially lower than RantWoman's estimate of the number of her trips. Then it registered with RantWoman that she just needed to get her disabled pass replaced.
RantWoman imagines that her situation is probably a small minority of situations that look to drivers like someone has not paid a fare. RantWoman has no idea whether these comments are helpful in deciding what the report actually means, but here the info is anyway.
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