Saskatoon Transit Go-Card System

I just wanted to make a couple of quick points about the new Card system that Saskatoon Transit started using on their buses. First off, I'll say that overall I'm glad they're going in this direction. Three years ago when I was in Korea this was already the norm, and pulled off a lot more successfully. Part of the advantage held by Korea is that when I was there, they already had very widespread use of the cards. Hopefully the system here will eventually catch up as they become more popular here.

So how did the system there 3 years ago work so much better than what I've been seeing in Saskatoon over the past 5 days?

Seoul Metro Transit Cards:
-Easily filled at many locations using quick machines. Insert card, insert cash (including bills) and go.
-Read quickly by machine on bus or in rail station. Errors are few and far between.
- No free transfer onto another bus, but you can transfer to and from rail using the same card, and you will be charged for a single trip. This may sound like a rip off, but keep in mind that the fee is lower than it is here, plus the system works by how far you go, not a single trip around the city. This is a lot more fair considering that you could be going only two stops, or going across 2 or more cities.



Saskatoon Transit Cards:
-Not as easy to reload.
-Read slowly by machine on the bus, and often messes up.
-Transfers by card go through fine, but if you choose to pay by cash, you are given a print out with a bar code, that the machines on the buses seem near-incapable of reading. This has caused great delays loading buses.

The ill-conceived transfer-printouts are what bother me the most I think. As I mentioned, these problems will probably decrease as people adopt the cards. I don't know that they will ever be able to refuse cash though, and if this is how they continue to deal with transfers the system is in for a bumpy ride. It's also possible that they are just working through some bugs in the first week of implementation. The use of card readers for this type of thing can be very successful, though, and I hope the city is able to pull it off.