MARTA's Breeze Card fare system crashed this morning and is still down this afternoon. The crash is attributed to a software upgrade and anyone with a breeze card, plastic or paper, is being allowed on by customer service representatives in all the stations. "Things are running smoothly, despite the technology snafu," reports Mike Morris of the AJC. This incident, while temporary, highlights a major problem facing transit systems "upgrading" to all-electronic fare systems.
These systems, while being robust in the sense that fees can be changed across the system fairly quickly to reflect a move toward distance based fares, these same systems are still sensitive enough that a glitch in the central server will crash the entire system. MARTA must be very careful as they go through their debugging process to make sure they have the resources available to make the all-electronic fare system work.
MARTA has a great way they can get out of this mess though. They can turn these potential bad-media days into free days to help their image. Anyone who can scrounge up a fare card can basically get in for free today, so why not just call it a free day? Other transit systems have free-ride days, and it does wonders to bolster their image. With MARTA's image hurting right now, they could use these problematic days for good public relations by making these free-ride days. Otherwise, these outages will make the $190 Million MARTA spent on the Breeze system look more like a liability than an asset.
Source: Mike Morris - AJC
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