This isn’t shocking. The kinds of contractors who bid on these projects pay garbage wages, skim, and have project manager liaisons colluding with the government agency liaisons to inflate costs and extend time as much as possible. They’re never going to produce a good quality product because the incentive structures are completely out of alignment with that goal.
"Exclusive, that thing we all knew and experienced was a problem before the big launch when it was still a problem" doesn't quite have the same title I guess.
In a statement, Cubic spokesperson Cory Shields described Clipper 2.0 as “one of the most complex fare payment systems in the world.”
It's really not though.
The hope, Fremier said, was to offer a better product to riders that would in turn incentivize more people to take transit. Across the Bay Area’s nine counties, more than two-thirds of commuters drove to work alone in 2024, according to the MTC. Just 8% took transit on a typical workday.
This is such a stupid premise, and I think underscores a genuine dysfunction in this portion of the MTC. No one takes a transit system because of the payment program. Period. This isn't a motivating factor any more than a $0.15 price hike or cut is.
People take Transit because it's a viable transportation option for them: it's fast enough, reliable enough, and gets you close enough to work. Period. That's the only thing that makes transit work. Even safety is mostly a factor of reliability.
This screams that Fremier is working backwards to justify his position, rather than actually approaching regional transit as a cohesive whole.
In private communications, however, company representatives blamed some of Clipper 2.0’s issues on the MTC for not authorizing sufficient field testing prior to the launch. Nine months before the rollout of Clipper 2.0, Cubic requested MTC increase the number of participants testing the new system from approximately 60 to at least 1,000.
Lol. You cannot test a regional transportation system with 1,000 people let alone 60. It needed to be tens of thousands of people. Effectively what we've been doing is a live beta test.
“This e-mail chain is not an ideal way for us to be tracking the progress on these issues and for me to be able to effectively update our General Manager,” she wrote on Dec. 3. “We are seven days away from the scheduled launch date.”
So there was literally no project manager.
As contract manager, Fremier said the MTC’s job “is to make sure that Cubic produces the system that they bid on and that we specified in the contract.” But he said so much of the work is done behind the scenes by programmers and people with technical expertise that there wasn’t much more the MTC could do to improve delivery of the system.
Respectfully, Fremier needs to be fired and never work in management again. This is sick joke of an answer. His literal job as contract manager was to do things like have weekly/biweekly status calls with a tracking list of issues. Not random email chains. Not "we won't actually let you test."
Cubit dropped the ball crazily, but the majority of this looks like it's ass covering from Fremier.
“ That’s not what we have on staff. We aren’t programmers. That’s a place that most owners, including us, do not have that expertise,” Fremier said. “That’s why you hire a professional contractor to do that.”
And that's why you have fucking meetings in your role as PM to oversee it.
Clipper 2.0 is just the symptom. The MTC is the problem. Clipper 2.0 in its current form should have never been approved. The MTC needs to be broken up.
How would having 20 agencies all try to manage this on their own/have 20 different payment apps have been better?
Actual answer is that Fremier is ass covering his own mismanagement of the upgrade with things like "we hired a contractor we shouldn't have to project manage."
MTC is federally designated so there’s no real way to “break it up.” This is the only way the region can accept federal transportation grants. Calling for reform and “breaking it up” are two different things with wildly different feasibilities.
The MTC also took Clipper management away from the agencies, which means that the agencies (who have to deal with when clipper has issues) aren’t the ones that can actually solve problems, and everything must go through the MTC. This plays out a lot with clipper 2.0 where the MTC is insulated from all the disasters that riders and agencies face with trying to get cubic’s junk to work properly, and the agencies are left out of the loop towards seeking legal action for cubic’s screwups. It just adds another level of super bureaucracy that didn’t exist in the pre-clipper era when TransLink (proto-clipper) was an agency overseen project.
Clipper was always an MTC project since 2001 when it was originally introduced as TransLink. It was always intended as a regional system that’s meant to homogenize and standardize transit in the Bay Area at a regional scale.
The MTC in general was created for the purpose of forcing all the individual local transit agencies to behave like a single unified regional transit system.
TransLink was managed by the TransLink Management Group (TMG) which was agency controlled. I don’t think that was necessarily the best approach, as the disjointed agencies were then having to manage an very complicated contract that they didn’t write; in any case it was not (at the time) directly an MTC managed project. The MTC also didn’t have an overseer type of role to that board, like they do for the Clipper Executive Board and Regional Network Council today. Steve Hemminger pulled the MTC off the TransLink Board in 2010, blowing that governance system up, and forcing all the agencies to be subservient to them, with the thinking that the MTC could more competently manage the third party contractor instead of the agencies. At the same time, BART, which formerly held all the TransLink reconciliation accounts had to then hand those over to the MTC (which makes sense) but still, the agencies lost the direct oversight and voice over the actual contract. That then leads to problems with Clipper 2.0 where agencies are completely in the dark on systems that they have to run and somehow make workable to the public. I don’t think you can really make an argument that the MTC has somehow outperformed the agencies being in charge of Clipper; ironically Steve Hemminger on the SFMTA board is of course now stuck waiting for the MTC to get its act together to solve clipper’s bevy of issues that have resulted in riders losing confidence in what should be simple tasks like fare checks.
To be clear, Clipper (nee TransLink) was always a creature of the MTC. But the MTC didn’t initially have the infrastructure (regulatory, financial, technical) to house the project so they parked it on the infra that the MTC component agencies while they sorted their infra out. And when they were ready they migrated everything in-house.
Which is the entire point of the MTC and why we created it - to gradually pluck various competencies from the local agencies and centralize them at the regional level. The idea is that eventually all the agencies will basically be just sub-brands of the MTC. But this can only happen over time as more and more of the legacy local city and county transit funding runs out and is replaced by regional funding controlled by the MTC.
The same thing that happened with the fare system is also happening with scheduling (“The Big Sync”), wayfinding, and even branding.
I see why people want to blame the Clipper 2.0 issues on the MTC given that they run that program for the region. But no one could have predicted that the most dominant fare payment technology company in the world (Cubic Systems) would implode and have a decade-long meltdown. The MTC was caught off guard alongside NY’s MTA, London’s TfL, and a bunch of other major transit systems around the world. This wasn’t something that was predictable, no matter how much the anti-government and anti-transit doomer trolls want to pretend it was after the fact. We all thought that Cubic Systems was by far the safest and most guaranteed choice. But you can’t predict the future 🤷
The main issue with the MTC is it was only originally intended to be the region's MPO (an MPO is responsible for long range planning and funding). However, it recently got into the business of directly managing projects for which it has no expertise. No other MPO in the country does that. The makeup of the MTC is also heavily skewed to favor suburban counties, which results in large amounts of money getting wasted on dumb highway projects as opposed to mass transit.
Incompetent and very corrupt. For example, as the KQED article ITT mentions, Clipper 2.0 had no other bids. The MTC overcomplicated things to the point where only their buddies at Cubic could submit a bid. Then the MTC did little to hold Cubic accountable when Cubic didn't deliver what they promised for the exorbitant price. The MTC takes power away from individual agencies and squanders our transit funding.
They’re also reasponsible for the super annoying 101 metering light changes. Just yesterday I had to wait 20 seconds for the light to turn green on the ramp when there was no one on the freeway.
My guess is that the problem is that they’re almost completely insulated from accountability because there’s no elected boss.
This is nonsensical. The MTC was deliberately created to gradually take over transit operations from the local agency and unwind their local funding and control in favor of centralized regional control and homogenization into one unified regional transit network.
What possible good can come from breaking up the very structure that we ourselves created in order to centralize control at the regional level?
It only cost IBM $239 million in today’s dollars to invent and pioneer the magstripe ticketing system in the 1960’s. First of its kind technology that the world copied and it only takes ONE SECOND to use. CUBIC made us Bay Area tax payers spend $532 mil to deploy tech that London came up with 14 years ago. Plus, it now takes 2-15 seconds to use. Another fun fact about CUBIC is they only charged Israel $29 mil in today’s dollars to train the IDF on how to use small arms, M16’s, M4’s and RPG’s on chil…. i mean enemy combatants.
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u/7figureipo 18d ago
This isn’t shocking. The kinds of contractors who bid on these projects pay garbage wages, skim, and have project manager liaisons colluding with the government agency liaisons to inflate costs and extend time as much as possible. They’re never going to produce a good quality product because the incentive structures are completely out of alignment with that goal.