The end of the monthly pass and the beginning of Hop

My wallet was feeling overly thick, so I took inventory and found a lot of expired TriMet passes.
As reported in the Payoff! report, I’ve switched over to the Hop Fastpass Card. No longer will I see the monthly color and artwork.  It’s just that boring purple card for the foreseeable future.  Still, I am saving money.

Just in case you were wondering what the back of the TriMet passes look like.

4 thoughts on “The end of the monthly pass and the beginning of Hop”

  1. It kind of warms my heart to see that the Tri-Met cards still look very similar to how they looked when I lived there 10 years ago. At least some things never change.

    1. Re: never changing. TriMet really botched transitioning people from the paper passes to the Hop Card. The card was introduced in July. Then, a week before February started, TriMet up and announced that starting in February, they wouldn’t sell any more paper passes, except at Pioneer Square. Everyone was supposed to start using the Hop Card.

      My thought was that this was not the time to abruptly say no more passes. This was the time to say that in six months (or a year) we would transition to cash and Hop Card only fares. Give people more than a week to get used to the idea, for crimeny’s sake. Unsurprisingly, the resulting backlash was huge and they walked that pronouncement back.

      Having now gotten used to the card, I think it works well. And people could use it just the same way as buying a monthly pass. Every month, walk to the place you buy a monthly pass and hand them $100. They will put the money on your card. But people don’t know that, because TriMet did no work to educate everyone.

      I like it because it’s saving me money. But I also liked walking over to Fred Meyer once per month, purchasing a pass, tucking it into my wallet and not thinking about it for another month, so I understand the huge “nu-uh!” Also, for all the paranoid people, TriMet now knows where everyone who uses a Hop card boards. There’s a whole paragraph in the FAQs about how to make it anonymous.

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