‘A Hot Mess': Transit Riders, Officials Skewer Contractor Over Flawed Clipper 2.0 Rollout

Elected officials and members of the public on Monday blasted the company operating the Bay Area’s Clipper card, after a multitude of errors have made a new version of the payment system basically unusable for many public transit riders since its rollout last month.

“The most charitable way I could describe the launch of Clipper 2.0 was, ‘It’s a hot mess,’ and that’s charitable,” said Denis Mulligan, general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway & Transportation District.

At Monday’s meeting of the Clipper Executive Board, speakers placed the blame squarely at the feet of Cubic Transportation Systems, the company contracted by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) to operate Clipper.

“I appear before you today to emphasize what a colossal screw-up this transition has been,” said Clipper user Phillip Weiss, who said he has been unable to access his Clipper account since Cubic rolled out its next generation Clipper card and app on Dec. 10. “I still have no idea when I will be able to use my account.”

Next generation Clipper is a long-awaited update, which promises improvements for cardholders, but the rollout has been plagued with glitches. Rick Bruce, a senior program manager at Cubic, laid out a laundry list of errors with the new system, including some SFMTA ticket vending machines taking money from customers without adding that money to a Clipper card, Clipper software timing out during routine operation and lags in identifying problems with the system.

Peter Montgomery-Torrellas, president of Cubic Transportation Systems, was apologetic and committed to having a “very different board meeting next February.” He said many issues would be “settling down” by this week, with some remaining issues “closing out” by the first two weeks of February.

“It’s completely unacceptable, and I’m deeply sorry for the experiences that you are having,” he said.

With a public transit funding crisis looming, and high-profile events including the Super Bowl and World Cup soon to arrive in the Bay Area, members of the board demanded that Cubic fix the issues by their next meeting on Feb. 23.

Board Chair Robert Powers said Cubic needed to make a “180-degree turn in the performance of this system and the rider experience, because if it isn’t and it’s much of the same, then it may be a bridge too far to recover from.”

Montgomery-Torrellas said Cubic instituted “hypercare” to ensure soon-to-arrive visitors for the Super Bowl have a good experience using the system.

“We are monitoring the system and making sure that any resource and any expertise required for anything that we see is checked every two hours, 24 hours a day,” he said.

Some of the people who called in to express their frustration identified themselves as software engineers and accused Cubic and the MTC of failing to properly test next generation Clipper before releasing it to the public.

“These were entirely preventable failures. I’m a software engineer and computer infrastructure engineer with a decade of experience. This launch to me speaks to a lack of technical oversight from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission,” said Evan Tschuy, a founder of the site Hiking by Transit.

The severity of the glitches is causing a significant number of calls to Clipper’s customer service center to go unanswered. Between Dec. 10 and Jan. 15, the customer service center received some 47,000 calls to agents, nearly four times the amount the call center was originally contracted to handle, according to MTC staff. With a daily average wait time of around 15 minutes — down from over an hour when the upgrade first launched — 23% of Clipper customers are hanging up before reaching a customer service agent.

Patrick McGowan with WSP USA Services, Inc, which handles customer service for next generation Clipper, said there are 46 full-time staff currently working at the Clipper call center, and that the company planned to hire 10 additional part-time staffers to handle the increased call volume they are experiencing.

Representatives from some transit agencies suggested that Cubic should be held financially liable for lost revenue due to the ongoing glitches. But Mulligan, with the Golden Gate Bridge Highway & Transportation District, lamented the damage the fiasco had caused to his riders.

“We have a relationship with them, and you broke that relationship, and my customer service staff can’t fix it,” Mulligan said.