Skip to main content

Clipper hits millionth card milestone

The San Francisco Bay Area's Clipper transit fare-collection programme has hit the magic one million active cards in circulation milestone. Staff at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) credit the surge to transit operator campaigns to transition more riders, especially youth and senior riders, from paper tickets and passes to the reloadable Clipper card before the end of the year.
March 23, 2012 Read time: 1 min

The San Francisco Bay Area's Clipper transit fare-collection programme has hit the magic one  million active cards in circulation milestone. Staff at the 343 Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) credit the surge to transit operator campaigns to transition more riders, especially youth and senior riders, from paper tickets and passes to the reloadable Clipper card before the end of the year.

As of Friday, 16 December, there were 1,000,606 active Clipper cards in use, up roughly 2,000 from the prior week. The million-plus active cards figure represents nearly a 30 per cent increase from the 778,197 active cards in circulation six months ago, and a 142 per cent increase from the 413,616 active cards in circulation a year ago.

Introduced by MTC in June of 2010 with five major transit systems (plus the Dumbarton Express), the Clipper program has been growing exponentially as more transit agencies have joined and as participating systems have been phasing out paper fare media and transitioning to the Clipper card.

Related Content

  • Florida's free flow tolling eases congestion, improves safety
    July 24, 2012
    A decade since Florida's Turnpike Enterprise first deployed electronic toll collection, the organisation's Director of Toll Operations Rick Nelson and Tom S. Knuckey of PBS&J look at progress. A decade on from the deployment of Florida's Turnpike Enterprise's state-wide SunPass pre-paid Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) programme, transponder sales have ballooned from 5,000 to more than 4,000,000. Over 70 per cent of the state's turnpike drivers participate in the system and transponder sales continue to gro
  • Rapid growth of bus rapid transit schemes on US Pacific coast
    January 27, 2012
    This section pulls together all the multi-modal topics in each issue. Subject matter will include smartcards; ticketing and payment systems; passenger information systems; fleet management for buses, trains and light rail; park and ride systems; on-line access to real-time information via Internet portals
  • Anywhere card delivers prepaid contactless ticketing
    January 25, 2012
    David Crawford investigates a far reaching initiative in integrated travel. The Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO), an operator of high speed commuter rail in the north eastern US, is not one of the world's best known transit providers. Its 13 stations along a single east-west route (three of them interchanges with other regional commuter lines) handle 40,000 passengers a day, travelling to and from Philadelphia, the US' fifth most populous city.
  • Speed reduction measures - carrot or stick?
    January 23, 2012
    In Sweden, marketing company DDB Stockholm employed a mock speed camera as part of a promotional campaign for automotive manufacturer Volkswagen. The result was worldwide online interest and promotion of the debate over excessive speed to the national level. A developing trend in traffic management policy is to look at how to induce road users to modify their behaviour by incentivising change rather than forcing it through the application of penalties. There have been several studies conducted into this; an