Go Wellington seems in clear breach of the Consumer Guarantees Act by making bus passengers pay with cash when the new, heavily promoted Snapper card refuses to work because of technical issues that seem to be common with its introduction.
The act requires that goods and services be fit for their advertised purpose, but Go Wellington bus drivers (presumably under instruction from the company) are demanding that Snapper passengers pay cash if the Snapper equipment on a bus is turned off or refuses to accept the card even if the card has plenty of money on it.
Even the DomPost, which published a letter to the editor from the bus company on Friday saying all was well with Snapper, has woken up to the fact that Snapper’s introduction is not going as smoothly as the company’s spin doctors say.
Its print edition Last Word column (not online) on page B4 on Saturday describes two Snapper trips on the 1 Island Bay and 3 Lyall Bay-Karori Park routes (the 1 and 3 are Wellington’s busiest bus routes, nominally trolley operated, and have weekday base frequencies of every 12 and 10 minutes respectively). The Last Word item is good enough to repeat in full:
Oh the joy. It’s being promoted as offering snappier travel. What they don’t tell you is that it’s not Go Wellington’s journey times that are snappy, it’s the drivers. Passenger on the No 1 from Island Bay this week reports a snappered-up customer who tried, unsuccessfully, to “tag on,” only to hear a monotonal message urging him to try again. And again. And again. When driver and passengers had heard monotone man at least 20 times the driver, well, snapped. “Just pay, okay,” he snarled. Next day, on the No 3 from Lyall Bay, it was the same story as a passenger tried to tag off. As monotone man droned at her the driver slammed the doors shut and pulled off. Passengers shouted, the bus lurched to a halt and the passenger stumbled off, stuffing her dead fish back into her bag.
The DomPost today also had a full-page ad promoting Snapper. “No coins. No clippings. No queues. Snapper your bus fare. It’s a new way to pay. Save time. Save hassles. Save 25pc off the cash price of a single adult fare,” it said.
As I have written before, the Snapper roll-out is not going as smoothly as the company claims and even with buses that have Snapper readers, they do not always work properly, which is making the buses later and later as passengers try to make the cards work.
It’s also costing Go Wellington hard cash. We went to town from Karori Park on Thursday night on the 7.55pm Route 3, for a film festival movie at the Embassy (The Orphanage, scary!). One of us used the trusty Gold Pass, the other Snapper as the bus had a live Snapper reader. We came home on the 10.40pm ex Courtenay Place No 3 which also had a live reader. But looking at the online transaction record (a great feature of Snapper despite genuinely concerned folk like Stephen Judd fearing Snapper is Big Brother), I discovered that the trip to town was charged as just $1 for a city section trip rather than the $2.63 fare it should have been, while the trip home was free, yet claimed we went to Hungerford Rd (the southern end of the 3 past Lyall Bay) rather than to Karori Park. This was with a Snapper card tagged on and off on both trips. On the trip home it refused to tag off at Karori Park on the first five attempts but finally did so when the driver did something to its controls.
Snapper uses GPS to tell where you get on and off the bus, so when it showed we got off at Hungerford Rd rather than Karori Park, that was an even bigger error than our inbound trip from Karori being read as just a city section. Though the errors were in our favour.
The legal position when a passenger gets on a Snapper-enabled bus with a Snapper card that has plenty of money on it, but a technical hitch stops the reader accepting the card and the driver demands the passenger pays in cash, seems clear and in favour of the passenger. By my reading of the law, I believe the driver (and the company) are required under the Consumer Guarantees Act to let the passenger travel for free, as the Snapper card and reader are clearly not fit for their purpose of paying for the journey.
Under the act, suppliers of goods and service must guarantee their products will:
- Be of acceptable quality
- Be fit for a particular purpose
- Match the description given in advertisements or sales brochures or by the sales assistant.
Snapper is being marketed by Go Wellington, NZ Bus and Infratil (which owns the buses and Snapper) as being a whiz-bang smart card that makes bus travel easier and can be used also to buy your coffee and make other small purchases in stores and cafes round town. This advertising clearly brings Snapper under the Consumer Guarantees Act including the bit about “sales assistants” as I have seen young women in Snapper uniforms accosting people on footpaths to push Snapper. The card is a product (“goods”) that is being used for a service (bus travel).
Most regular Go Wellington passengers use either a monthly Gold Pass or a 10-trip ticket and have no need to have cash on them for a bus trip. I go to work most days with no cash on me. Who needs it any more? The 10-trip ticket is being replaced by Snapper from the end of this month. The bus company is clearly legally liable for its replacement being fit for purpose, as Snapper is being advertised as the replacement for the 10-trip ticket.
Once again, let me emphasise I think Snapper is a good system and I think its teething problems will be sorted out. This is, after all, identical technology to that used in London, Hong Kong, Seoul and many other cities. I’d like to see it extended to all public transport services in the Wellington region. But I am fed up with the spin from NZ Bus that claims everything is fine when it obviously is not.
If the Snapper readers refuse to accept a legitimate Snapper card with sufficient funds, passengers should not be refused travel if they have no cash to pay for it, nor made to pay cash if they have cash on them. Nor should passengers with a Snapper card be required to pay in cash if the bus they get on has its Snapper equipment turned off. NZ Bus and Go Wellington should accept this and instruct drivers accordingly. Now. Today.
12 Comments
August 2, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I don’t fear that recording transactions is “big brother” – it’s in tying the records to my identity that the risk lies.
Luckily, you can use any old email address to sign up, it turns out, so I am quite mollified at this point.
August 2, 2008 at 2:02 pm
It’s not just when the reader has a technical hitch that is annoying, but when the bus doesn’t have a reader at all. In either case I’ve been demanding free passage, and a couple of drivers have been fairly happy to grant it…
Also, have pleasingly discovered that if I put my snapper card in an outside pocket of my wallet, I just have to swipe the wallet against the reader – teh awesome!
August 2, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Have you ever noticed that the bus clock up the front and the Snapper clock are sometimes 3 or 4 minutes out? I wonder which one the drivers go by when deciding whether the bus is late or not.
[Poneke says: The Snapper clock works off GPS and should always be accurate. The bus clock (only fitted to post-2000 buses) is often wrong. My understanding is that drivers have traditionally departed terminii based on their wristwatch times, not the bus clock time. With the advent of Snapper, they should be able to use the Snapper time -- and this will also allow an accurate measure of whether buses are on time or not.]
August 2, 2008 at 5:58 pm
>If the Snapper readers refuse to accept a legitimate Snapper card with sufficient funds, passengers should not be refused travel if they have no cash to pay for it, which is happening. And they should not be required to pay cash if they have it, if a legitimate card does not work on a Snapper-enabled bus, which happens repeatedly. NZ Bus and Go Wellington should accept this and instruct drivers accordingly. Now.
It’d be free in London…
http://london-underground.blogspot.com/2008/07/londoners-not-paying-for-oyster-card.html
August 2, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I just checked my transaction record and sadly I just found one incorrectly located tag-off.
On Tuesday morning I got my morning bus from Courtenay Place and got off at the north end of Lambton Quay, as the bus didn’t stop at the railway station. This should have just been the $1.00 inner-city zone fare.
But Snapper has recorded my alightment stop as “The Terrace at Bolton St (near 25)” and charged me $1.13 for a one-zone trip.
It’s only a 13c difference, but I’m far more concerned that the Snapper reader somehow thought I’d got off 100m up the hill.
I wonder if they’ll refund me that 13c.
August 3, 2008 at 1:35 am
It seems odd given that the same technology (and perhaps the same problems) has been used overseas, and surely if the same problems have come up, there must be solutions out there. Obviously Hong Kong or Seoul could not have put up with such errors for long.
I don’t recall any problems with Chch’s Metrocard, but it’s much simpler technology.
August 3, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I wonder if they’ll refund me that 13c.
I’ve referred all of this to NZ Bus and the regional council for their comments.
I hope to get more than spin in reply.
August 3, 2008 at 9:08 pm
My balance is still not showing a return trip from Friday. The promise of “up to the previous day” is broken too.
August 4, 2008 at 9:31 am
The bus I was on last Friday (no3 to Karori) was stuck for most of my journey thinking it was in Courtenay Place. The driver tried unsuccessfully to reset it a couple of times – anyone travelling then would have gotten a city section regardless of where they went. I’ve seen a driver wave snapper-bearing passengers on free when the snapper’s been out of action.
August 4, 2008 at 8:20 pm
On privacy and Snapper.
August 5, 2008 at 9:39 am
My bus this morning encountered a “system error” according to the little voice, and then rebooted.
I now know why they’ve had so much trouble- After a couple of minutes, I thought I heard the Windows Vista login noise!!!!!
Surely not? Please tell me I’m imagining things…
August 22, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I thought it was appropriate to award some kudos to the Snapper crew.
I frequently had problem tagging off, not so this week.
Snappers website has been updated.
The transaction history has been up to date the times I have looked at it recently.
The friendly bus driver informed me I can’t tag on while he is dispensing a ticket (seems it can’t multi-task). Since then, I haven’t had any problems tagging on.
So it looks like real progress has been made.
Thanks to all who have help to improve the experience.
Keep up the good work.