Riders of the West Coast Express are the next group getting a swipe at TransLink’s $200 million Compass Card system, the transit provider announced Thursday.
TransLink said staff will be handing out 7,500 Compass Cards and helping people get used to the tap-in, tap-out system at various West Coast Express stations starting June 8.
About 15,000 post-secondary students were given Compass Cards earlier this spring, but TransLink said West Coast Express users will be the first to ever pay for fares using the system.
“We promised to deliver Compass to our customers in a phased manner, and that is exactly what we are doing,” interim CEO Doug Allen said in a statement.
Another 50,000 students from the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, B.C. Institute of Technology and Langara will also have their paper U-Passes switched to Compass Cards on June 1.
TransLink said it expects there to be about 220,000 people using Compass by September, including 130,000 students from 10 post-secondary schools and 85,000 TransLink employees and B.C. Bus Pass users.
The Compass Card system was originally intended to launch in 2013, but has been pushed back repeatedly due to technical issues with electronic card readers.
TransLink said the readers weren’t fast enough or accurate enough when users tried to tap-out, preventing the system from knowing how far they had travelled so it could charge them accordingly.
