Bright Ideas: BC Ferries Ticketing

Recently I traveled on BC Ferries from Vancouver to the Gulf Islands (a few kilometers from Victoria) and went via the Tsawassen Swartz Bay Ferry and then took another ferry to get to the island itself. All of this was fine, it was the only scheduling option which worked for me at the time (and direct ferries on this run are practically non existent)

I bought my ticket at the terminal received a boarding pass for the Vancouver-Victoria ferry but not for the second Victoria Gulf Islands ferry. When I asked about this I was told I needed to go thru the ticket lineup at the other end and get another boarding pass there (after waiting in a line)

I understand there is a need to have accurate passenger counts on board ferries, but why not issue one boarding pass / receipt (cut down on paper use) and then use a handheld barcode scanner computer similar to those used at sporting venues to validate someone as boarding the vessel? That way one ticket could work for multiple journeys or barring that, all of the boarding passes could be issued at the point of origination saving the need for a big lineup at the other end.

No idea what the costs would be, but this would enable people to make tight connections on ferries a lot easier rather than running like crazy and hoping you’ll still make the boat.

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This entry was posted on April 02nd, 2010 and is filed under Essays, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.