The folks at TAP are pretty good at wining and dining transit agency executives, but not good at creating a customer friendly smart card solution for transit riders.

The expiration clause is simply unforgivable, and it's great for TAP because the riders tend to *have* to use the bus. They can't simply switch to a competitor because bus and rail systems in America are government owned monopolies.

It's such a racket. An honest politician could score some points fighting this, in theory, if bus riders were a desirable constituency.

If the goal was to bring Suica-like functionality to Los Angeles, well, they failed miserably. TAP and fare gates is one of the reasons I stopped riding transit and have gone back to my car. At least I have an alternative.

Completely inexcusable.

Bring out the Anonymous guys!

Looks like the guys running this scheme wants to hide something.

I checked the FAQ section of that website http://taptogo.net/tapfaqs.php?hmm=tf

and all it says about expiration dates is that "The TAP card itself is designed to last about 3 years; eventually, you'll need a replacement card" but it says nothing about refunds or any process how to get your funds back.

You'd think something like that would be important, but apparently the guys running TAP thinks it's unimportant enough to be placed way at the bottom so people will overlook it.


FAIL

The fact that the card expires also implies the funds on it also expire, otherwise there would be no point in buying a new card. If it was me I wouldn't give a shit, $12 over 3 years is fuck all. Then again if it was me I'd plan so that I didn't have any money left by the expiration date.

>>328798
Certainly it is a small loss considering the total amount of money that has circulated through the card, and given awareness of the expiration date, it would be simple to avoid leaving a balance on the card. However, these are not the real issues, it's the principality of the matter. From the image shown, it seems like they suggest that the card itself will be broken/unusable after 3 years, and nowhere is it explicitly stated that the cards will expire with no way to retrieve the funds. Yet according to the first link, it is stated in the the tap cardholder agreement that the cards expire in three years, and that they will deduct $1 a month fee from any remaining balance. According to some commenters, they never agreed to that, though they may not have read hard enough.
tl;dr these guys are dicks, but anon signed their contract, so he's fucked

>>329068
I did not sign any contract or whatsoever. They don't even give you anything to sign. They were giving these cards out for free when they first issued them and they gave me no FAQ pamphlet or whatever. How the fuck was I supposed to know that this had an expiration date?

Now I'm one of the lucky ones who have $10 on it, but what if it was someone who had $50, maybe $100 on the card?

The whole concept is stupid, these cards should never expire. In fact, I know of no other agency that has these contactless cards to expire. The card makers who make them, Cubic, issues similar ones for San Francisco's Clipper Card and they have no expiration date.

This is bait and switch at its finest.

>>329071
I smell a class action lawsuit