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Select buses supposedly are in use to speed up the boarding and consequently, the ride which the do a bit, IMO.
I don't know if other cities have this, but in my recent stay in San Francisco I did notice that they sped up the boarding process entirely differently by having a place to swipe one's Clipper Card (their semi-equivalent to our Metrocard) at both the back and rear doors, so folks didn't wait on a long line to board at busy stops. Once I even saw the officers coming on to check whether all passengers had paid -- they had hand-held sensors to read Clipper Cards -- just like they do sometimes on Select Service here.
As said above, in the sense that you don't pay when you board as said, all buses in San Francisco are select buses. You tap the card against the scanners on the bus, if there's a line you can wait a bit while the bus is moving. Of course, you could get away with not paying but there are occasional spot checks to see if you paid.
The Orange and Silver Lines in Los Angeles are like this, though they are supposed to be BRT and not traditional bus service.
Pretty sure off-board payments were supposed to be a feature of the Rapid Bus series in LA but that feature was cut due to budgetary restriction. I could be wrong about that though.
Oakland is working on bus rapid transit with off bus payment to open in 2017. But like in sf, all buses take clipper, and you can tag inon the sensor. This speds boarding a lot. Clipper works on all of the major local agenciee. More expansion is planned. Sadly the Bay has about 18 or 20 separate agencies. So it is a pain on multiple levels. SF is techically served by 6: Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC transit, Golden Gate transit and SAMtrans.
Clipper works on all of the major local agenciee. More expansion is planned. Sadly the Bay has about 18 or 20 separate agencies. So it is a pain on multiple levels.
Necessity is the mother of invention . . . and Clipper is a pretty amazing invention.
NYC, Philly, DC, Chicago, Portland, LA - are all multi-agency regions and AFAIK none of them are there yet. Philly is the only one I know of with a similar card on the horizon. The game changer with Clipper is being able to keep 6 different passes and stored value on one card. Like if you were really masochistic and wanted to commute from Berkeley to Redwood City everyday you could have an ACTransit monthly pass, a SamTrans monthly pass and you could keep $50 on there for BART and Muni trips.
In Portland, you can sort of do this if the bus you are catching is near a MAX stop because the tickets are universal. Simply buy a ticket or an all day pass at a kiosk and it is good for both buses and trains.
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