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The black boxes of buses >> Montreal is the only city in the world with those mysterious transfer machines
by PHILIP PREVILLE Second in a series
The transfer machine was designed and built by a French company called Camp in 1966. The objective: create a machine to dispense transfers which could be automatically read by the metro turnstiles (which were also built by Camp). By the mid-1970s Camp went bankrupt, leaving the MUCTC to maintain the machines--including the manufacture of all necessary replacement parts. The MUCTC has 1,600 buses, and about 2,000 transfer dispensers. The transfer is classic '60s technology: a miniature computer punch card. The daily secret code creates one array of holes to mark the day, while the time-stamp creates a second array of holes; that's how the punch-card-reading metro turnstiles can tell if they're valid or not. Transfers are valid for 90 minutes from point of boarding. Although the machine is powered by the bus's battery and makes an impressive, rolling "ka-chunk" sound when the driver pulls a transfer out, the machine doesn't even have its own clock. The driver has to check his watch and update the machine's time every 15 minutes. Every morning, when the first bus drivers arrive for their shift, they're given a "secret code," chosen at random, to punch into the back of the machine. The same code is also fed into the metro turnstiles every morning. Final factoid: Though metro turnstiles cannot be duped to accept old transfers, bus drivers can. Frequent bus-riders often collect transfers without ink markings on them, and reuse them over and over again. According to the MUCTC, this kind of "fare fraud" amounts to losses totalling 3 per cent of revenue, or about $5 million, every year. |
In almost every city in North America, bus transfers are printed on pads of paper, ripped by the driver to mark the time you board the bus. But that's not good enough for Montreal--just to be different, we commissioned our very own custom-made bus-transfer contraption.