Fare Gates comes with new Transit peeves!

So you're going down the stairs at Surrey Central Station, where there's only 3 gates. One for wheelchairs, and the middle one is set to only let people tap in. You go towards the only out gate, when Miss Birdy Bigbags comes out of the elevator and beats you to the gate. She piles all her bags in front of the exit, and has to spend the next 20 minutes going through every fucking bag to find her fucking ticket, so she can tap out. She could have put her bags aside, but instead, she insists on being an ignorant bitch and blocks the one and only gate, so the rest of us have to wait for her fat ass to find her ticket and tap out.

There has also been other instances where people stop right in front of the gate and dig through their bags to find their tickets, while holding up the line. PLEASE HAVE YOUR FUCKING TICKET READY, or at least move aside, so others can tap in or out.

the other thing that annoys me, is when a bunch of people are either entering or exiting the station, all at once, and they use all the gates. You can't tap, from the other side, until the gates close. Meanwhile, people going the opposite way, can still tap, while the gate is open. You practically have to wait for the entire line to go through before you can even tap. There should be one-way gates to the right, in each direction.

And what is with one of the gates not even responding, when you tap, at King George Station? WTF?

Anything else annoys you about these gates?

 

... thanks for sharing, Elmware. you've brought up some interesting points there. have you got any recommendations for what skytrain should do to make things run smoother? what has to be done?

 

I think they should make the first one or two gates, on each side, only one way. (eg: Far right can only tap in from outside. From the inside, far right (outside left) can only tap out.) any gates in the middle can be both way. The idea would be to keep people moving on the right, instead of across all the gates.

As for stacking your baggage in front of the gates, while you dig for your ticket. That should be common etiquette to have your tickets ready or move aside, so others can pass. Especially where there are so few gates to pass.

There was one problem that I thought I could foresee, but to my surprise, it's not as major as I had imagined it would be. I figured that during rush hour, as people unload from buses to lineup, that it would take a long time to get through the gates, while waiting for people to tap in and out. Just like how it takes forever to board the bus, ever since they put those electronic fare boxes in, because they are finicky, or people can't figure out which way to place their tickets in. Those boxes are a joke. Here we are standing in the rain, waiting for someone to figure out which way their ticket goes in, just to validate it. Surprisingly, the Compass RFID technology seems to be much quicker, when it doesn't give you errors. The only issue is, when you get an error, or it fails to read your card, you have to wait a few seconds for the screen to go green, so you can scan it again. Otherwise, it just keeps getting that error, if you don't wait long enough.