- KINOKO EVANS
E-TICKET TO THE FUTURE
RE: “Ticketless to Ride” [News, Sept 2], regarding concerns over the transition of Portland’s public transportation to digital fares.
DEAR MERCURY—I’ll give you that TriMet runs through public money like a 12-year-old girl with a Hot Topic gift card. But your story about the coming e-fare system smells wrong. You take issue with the fact that “60 percent of bus stops are more than a quarter mile from the nearest e-fare retail outlet,” while you separately mention the fact that TriMet plans to quadruple the number of such outlets by the time the system goes live in 2017. Citizen oversight is always good, and I applaud OPAL’s work in this area so far, but it seems like trolling to make a big deal out of where retail locations are. I mean, I assume that Portland will do what every big city in the world does: Sell fare cards online. And most major cities refund the charge to buy the card, at least partially.