Port Authority to implement fareboxes by March

Riding on the Port Authority will take a new spin in the next few months, when Pitt students… Riding on the Port Authority will take a new spin in the next few months, when Pitt students will serve as guinea pigs for a new transit program.

Over the next two months, the Port Authority will install its new fareboxes — originally meant for last year — on many buses traveling through Oakland, according to Port Authority spokesman Jim Ritchie.

The new addition means Pitt students will need to tap their Panther Cards on an orange square on the farebox to enter the bus.

Pitt issued the Panther Cards with the new technology last year, Pitt spokesman John Fedele said.

The program for Pitt students will serve as a pilot for a general program in the city that will start in 2011.

Pitt students using the new fareboxes “will help us very much before we start with the whole city,” Ritchie said. “We want to learn a bit from Pitt’s use of the system.”

Ritchie said that they intend on checking two factors with the upcoming pilot at Pitt: to make sure the fareboxes work at a large scale, and that their data-gathering program works.

The new fareboxes will allow the Port Authority to track ridership — meaning a rider who uses the card in Monroeville and then gets on another bus in Downtown will show up in their system. Ritchie said that the Authority will not track individuals’ data, just where general riders get on or leave the bus.

He said that the new data will help Port Authority see where riders tend to travel and allow Port Authority to better respond to changing trends.

“If there’s a large population going from McCandless to Oakland for instance, we’ll be seeing that for the first time,” Ritchie said.

Buses from the East Liberty Garage will get the new fareboxes first. Ritchie said the garage serves many routes that go through Oakland and the EBA, EBS and P3 routes that use the East Busway.

On the practical side, Ritchie said that the farebox card reader will be sensitive enough that students should not have to worry about most carrying cases being too thick.

The technology in the card — a radio antenna attached to a computer chip — won’t be affected by magnets like the strips on credit cards, Ritchie said. However, he said that students need to make certain that they don’t bend the cards or poke holes in them.

Seniors are supposed to turn in their cards to Panther Central when they graduate to prevent non-students from using the transit service, Fedele said. He didn’t say whether the radio antenna would work once the card has expired.

The yearlong delay in the new fareboxes came from a problem with the machines “eating” bills. Ritchie said that the new fareboxes were supposed to validate currency, but some were jamming instead when first installed.

The Port Authority announced Wednesday night that they had fixed the initial problems with the new boxes and will install them over the next year.

“This is going to replace the old, outdated stuff that’s been there for years,” Ritchie said.