Buoyed by a surge in back-to-school ridership on Bay Area public transit systems, the Clipper® card for the first time recently hit and surpassed the milestone of a half-million average daily boardings.
The Clipper kiosk at San Francisco’s Embarcadero BART/Muni station is a popular place for getting a free Clipper card — including youth and senior cards for most participating systems — as well as for adding value and troubleshooting problems. Photo by Peter Beeler
By Brenda Kahn
Published: October, 2011
Buoyed by a surge in back-to-school ridership on Bay Area public transit systems, the Clipper® card for the first time recently hit and surpassed the milestone of a half-million average daily boardings.
There were nearly 560,000 average daily boardings using the Clipper card on the region’s seven participating transit systems for the week ending September 16, 2011, a nine-fold increase from the 63,000 daily boardings logged by MTC’s precursor electronic fare collection system before the introduction of Clipper just over a year ago, in June 2010.
"Transaction volume has been exploding over the last 12 months," said Jake Avidon, Clipper senior program coordinator for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
Spikes in youth boardings on AC Transit and San Francisco Muni helped to push overall traffic past the half-million mark. Muni, AC Transit and BART staged a number of outreach events this summer to sign up youths for the program, with nearly 55,000 Clipper youth cards distributed to date.
Among the seven Bay Area transit operators participating in the Clipper program, San Francisco Muni is leading the charge, with 336,000 average daily boardings using Clipper the week ending September 16, which equates to almost half of the agency’s nearly 700,000 daily boardings (per the American Public Transportation Association, or APTA).
Muni completed migration of its adult monthly passes to Clipper earlier this year. As of this August, Muni completed the smooth transition of its youth monthly pass to Clipper-only, and is on to the next frontier: encouraging customers who use cash for each ride to pay with Clipper (which can carry a cash balance as well as passes).
Meanwhile, over a third of BART’s weekday riders are using Clipper to pay their fares, with more than 140,000 average daily boardings using Clipper the week ending September 16.
"You don’t need (paper) tickets anymore. No small leftover values to consolidate, and magnets are your friend again," BART points out enthusiastically on its website, alluding to the weaknesses of the old paper-based tickets, which are prone to being disabled by magnets in purse clasps and the like. The website also promotes the convenience of Clipper: "When you get to the fare gate, tag, open and go!"
AC Transit logged 50,000 average daily boardings the week ending September 16, a quarter of its ridership.
Also currently participating in Clipper are Golden Gate Transit and Ferry in the North Bay, Sam Trans and Caltrain on the Peninsula, and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) in the South Bay.
Overall, there are nearly a million Clipper cards in active use, and Clipper fare payments now account for about a third of the roughly 1.5 million daily transit trips in the Bay Area.
Looking at the big picture, MTC is in the final stages of completing deployment among the region’s major transit operators, which together account for 95 percent of transit ridership in the region, and is now looking at further expansion to the region’s other 20 or so transit systems. Next in line is the San Francisco Bay Ferry system operated by the Water Transportation Emergency Authority, which by the spring of 2012 will deploy Clipper® at its ferry terminals, including the new one under construction in South San Francisco.
For more information on obtaining and loading a Clipper card, go to www.clippercard.com.
A surge in youth ridership has driven Clipper daily ridership past the half-million mark. Photo by Noah Berger
A Clipper ambassador demonstrates how to use a Clipper-ready S.F. Muni fare machine. Photo by Noah Berger
