Beginning of this year we said goodbye to the cardboard 10 trip tickets on buses and hello to the new “Go Card”. I put off using the new Smart Card for a number of reasons but have been using it solidly for a few weeks now and there’s lots of room for improvement. The best thing about the card is you don’t have to have multiple tickets that work in various zone combinations, instead it charges you the appropriate amount based on your travel and you continually top up your balance. My biggest issue with the whole system is pretty much having to check your history online to ensure you’ve been charged the correct amounts. Most of the time it’s hard to see the quick flash of balance and charges are you’re propelled out the back door with 40+ other passengers behind you. So for now I’ll just leave my whinges about the site itself.
Managing your Go-Card site
- Firstly the Translink site haven’t set up both “A” records in their DNS and IIS (or other web server) i.e. http://www.translink.com.au/go works just fine but if you use http://translink.com.au/go you end up on your favourite search engine screen. I’m constantly surprised by the number of sites that don’t do this.
- Maintaining your go card – to login you have to enter the 16 digit number of the card. I seem to be a little dyslexic with numbers so I find this annoying. Can’t I just set up a username and have my card/s linked to that?
- Exporting your data – Most transaction history sites allow you to export to excel. It’s useful if you need to use it for your tax records etc. but this site does not have this feature. There are no paper account statements sent out so I would expect there to be an easy way for me to save this for my records. Instead it just has a long list of trips to look at on screen.There’s also no explanation of what the codes mean. I assume something like BT002403 identifies which stop you are getting on/off at but who knows. It also doesn’t tell you which bus you were on. This makes it hard to reconcile some of the charges with the trips you made.
- Strange charges – I pretty much get on and off at the same stop every day. You need to check you online statement for unexplained charges. Here on the 22nd, same stops as usual is 40c dearer for no explained reason. Also note the double charge on the 23rd December that must have picked up and registered some form of double tap of the card. The transactions are within 2 seconds. I would have thought there’d be some sort of Use Case that would not allow a touch off and on within a certain timeframe > than say 30 seconds to prevent these errors.
So anyone else out there have any thoughts on the new system?