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I'm with you that SEPTA appears to be doing a lousy job of getting the word out to seniors about what the new payment technology will require them to do, but I don't get your objection to swiping a state ID through a mag-stripe reader. Bouncers at bars now do this regularly to verify that would-be patrons are of legal drinking age. I know it's possible, but I seriously doubt that anyone in SEPTA IT would set something up to capture personally identifiable information about a patron who swipes a card through a turnstile reader and fence it to someone.
Either you have forgotten about my career in IT or you never knew about it in the first place. I see it as another inroad for active hackers, who lurk continually, to find another way to fish for and breach data
base security.
It's not just seniors. March will arrive, Septa will make the new system live and there will be people thinking they can still use tokens. Also the number of smart card machines I see in stations is probably going to be inadequate. Why does septa think 2-4 machines, per station, will be adequate?
If I may change the subject for just a moment ... has anyone noticed in the past year or so the color of the clock faces on the City Hall tower has changed? At night I mean - when they're lit up. The color used to be yellow. P I S S yellow. Now they're sorta a cream or ivory off-white. Big improvement in my opinion.
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
23,814 posts, read 34,706,106 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyb01
Either you have forgotten about my career in IT or you never knew about it in the first place. I see it as another inroad for active hackers, who lurk continually, to find another way to fish for and breach data
base security.
It's not just seniors. March will arrive, Septa will make the new system live and there will be people thinking they can still use tokens. Also the number of smart card machines I see in stations is probably going to be inadequate. Why does septa think 2-4 machines, per station, will be adequate?
This will be an updated varient of the PATCO ticket system. There will be short-term chaos, but when it settles down you won't need a huge number of machines. Keep in mind that PATCO riders who transfer pay in the NJ PATCO stations. This is what PATCO has transitioned to for reduced fare. PATCO
Have you ridden PATCO over the years? It opened in 1969 with ticket vending machines for plastic pre-programmed tickets. You want to talk about blowing peoples' minds. You should have seen the older people of our parents & grandparents generations when they encountered that! You would have thought that they'd just encountered magic carpets.
This will be an updated varient of the PATCO ticket system. There will be short-term chaos, but when it settles down you won't need a huge number of machines. Keep in mind that PATCO riders who transfer pay in the NJ PATCO stations. This is what PATCO has transitioned to for reduced fare. PATCO
Have you ridden PATCO over the years? It opened in 1969 with ticket vending machines for plastic pre-programmed tickets. You want to talk about blowing peoples' minds. You should have seen the older people of our parents & grandparents generations when they encountered that! You would have thought that they'd just encountered magic carpets.
I guess I'm poorly trying it make the point that if septa wants this to succeed, they should have started the "education" phase months and months ago in ways beyond their website link discussing "septa key". There's no posted literature in any stations I use regularly, like City Hall/15 th St, that the change is almost upon us. Folks see the new turnstiles but do most actually know what they mean or what they're about?
The chances of decreasing chaos, at least at first, seem remote to me.
And, yes, I use PATCO sometimes and, yes, I remember how radical it was in the beginning.
If I may change the subject for just a moment ... has anyone noticed in the past year or so the color of the clock faces on the City Hall tower has changed? At night I mean - when they're lit up. The color used to be yellow. P I S S yellow. Now they're sorta a cream or ivory off-white. Big improvement in my opinion.
The funny story here is that the original color of the clock faces was intended to be white; however, as it took almost 20 years to finish construction of City Hall, by the time the building was finished the glass was already stained yellow by all the soot and pollution in the air. Keep in mind that this was during the height of the polluted industrial 'workshop of the world' era. The clock remained that way for the next 90 years, and the yellow light of the city hall clock tower, the tallest thing in the city, was what philadelphians looked up at every night. If you look at old pictures of City Hall tower, the whole tower was stained practically black from the same soot. People were so accustomed to the yellow color of the clock that when City Hall tower was renovated in the 1990's, there was so much popular outcry over the newly white glass, that it was soon changed back to the familiar 'historical' yellow color. It looked a bit funny, as otherwise this was the first time in its history that the rest of city hall tower had actually ever been clean and white.
And now...its been finally brought back to the original intent.
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
23,814 posts, read 34,706,106 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kyb01
I guess I'm poorly trying it make the point that if septa wants this to succeed, they should have started the "education" phase months and months ago in ways beyond their website link discussing "septa key". There's no posted literature in any stations I use regularly, like City Hall/15 th St, that the change is almost upon us. Folks see the new turnstiles but do most actually know what they mean or what they're about?
The chances of decreasing chaos, at least at first, seem remote to me.
And, yes, I use PATCO sometimes and, yes, I remember how radical it was in the beginning.
I wasn't taking a shot at you. However, PATCO is the perfect example of what will happen. I started taking the High Speed Line in September of '69. PATCO had people posted to assist riders, except overnight, for a couple of years & it was spotty on weekends. If SEPTA doesn't do that, they are fools.
I still remember seeing astounded people. Some were pretty important people, based on their looks & attire. You could have knocked them over with a feather. Somebody ran me through it once & I was good to go. It took some of the older people quite a while to adjust. That was extremely high tech in 1969. The good thing is that there are 2 younger generations that are behind ours who will take to this like our generation took to PATCO. Our generation has been acclimating to new things all of our lives. There aren't all that many of the previous generations still walking around taking SEPTA.
I've heard people wondering when SEPTA would go with something like the PATCO system for at least 25 or 30 years. I think that SEPTA knew enough to wait. I believe that there will be chaos for a while, regardless of how much preparation the public has.
I think SEPTA was smart to wait and to also start from scratch. No other transit system in the United States (correct me if I'm wrong) is doing anything like SEPTA is. They will be playing catch-up after SEPTA has this implemented. I'm just anxious for everything with the Roll-Out. There was a lot of issues in the beginning and prbly still now.
*Transpass Limits,
*Tagging in and out of Regional Rail stations....is that still in the cards ?
*Gating the Center City Stations ( Are they still going to do so ?...I haven't heard anything about it in a long time...im sure it will come up since '16 is the year the NPT side gets worked on the Commuter Rail side)
The funny story here is that the original color of the clock faces was intended to be white; however, as it took almost 20 years to finish construction of City Hall, by the time the building was finished the glass was already stained yellow by all the soot and pollution in the air. Keep in mind that this was during the height of the polluted industrial 'workshop of the world' era. The clock remained that way for the next 90 years, and the yellow light of the city hall clock tower, the tallest thing in the city, was what philadelphians looked up at every night. If you look at old pictures of City Hall tower, the whole tower was stained practically black from the same soot. People were so accustomed to the yellow color of the clock that when City Hall tower was renovated in the 1990's, there was so much popular outcry over the newly white glass, that it was soon changed back to the familiar 'historical' yellow color. It looked a bit funny, as otherwise this was the first time in its history that the rest of city hall tower had actually ever been clean and white.
And now...its been finally brought back to the original intent.
Just did a lil research and learned something new. So apparently what happened is that the clock faces had indeed yellowed due to pollution, but the lights illuminating the faces had always been white. When the clock faces were cleaned and the soot stains removed, and some didn't like the newly white looks, they then just changed the colors of the lights to yellow to simulate the old yellowed look of the faces.
This first happened in 1963, and then I guess the light color flip-flopped a few times, in the 90's and then again recently.
So it would theoretically be pretty easy to change the color of the clock to any color.
I read a good idea about potentially installing color changing LEDs to illuminate the clock so they could change it for special events, kind of like the Empire state building.
I think SEPTA was smart to wait and to also start from scratch. No other transit system in the United States (correct me if I'm wrong) is doing anything like SEPTA is. They will be playing catch-up after SEPTA has this implemented. I'm just anxious for everything with the Roll-Out. There was a lot of issues in the beginning and prbly still now.
*Transpass Limits,
*Tagging in and out of Regional Rail stations....is that still in the cards ?
*Gating the Center City Stations ( Are they still going to do so ?...I haven't heard anything about it in a long time...im sure it will come up since '16 is the year the NPT side gets worked on the Commuter Rail side)
All three of those things are still in the cards.
I'm not keen on treating the central Regional Rail stations like subway stations, but I can live with it.
I have a bigger beef with the ride caps on the "unlimited" calendar-based passes.
I would have much preferred that SEPTA simply change these to discounted bulk-purchase passes NOT linked to a calendar period. IOW, you purchase 80 or 250 trips, and when you use them up, you buy more. If you use them up in less than the old calendar period, fine; if you use them up in a longer period, fine.
Of course, this presents a revenue downside for SEPTA in that it's probably the case that most calendar-pass users take fewer than the capped number of trips, possibly far fewer. (ISTR that the pass prices are based on 5 two-vehicle-each-way round trips for a weekly and 22 of these for a monthly; that would work out to 20 and 88 unlinked trips respectively. But after doing the math, it seems my recollection is incorrect, for $2.80 (token + transfer) x 10 = $28 and $2.80 x 44 = $123.20; the actual prices are $24 and $91 respectively.
Just did a lil research and learned something new. So apparently what happened is that the clock faces had indeed yellowed due to pollution, but the lights illuminating the faces had always been white. When the clock faces were cleaned and the soot stains removed, and some didn't like the newly white looks, they then just changed the colors of the lights to yellow to simulate the old yellowed look of the faces.
This first happened in 1963, and then I guess the light color flip-flopped a few times, in the 90's and then again recently.
So it would theoretically be pretty easy to change the color of the clock to any color.
I read a good idea about potentially installing color changing LEDs to illuminate the clock so they could change it for special events, kind of like the Empire state building.
That would be cool.
I've also wondered why the top of City Hall is so white while the rest of the building is more off-white/tan.
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That would be cool.
