Clipper Card Glitch Forced You to Overpay

A glitch in Clipper cards means many customers were overcharged.

Check your Clipper Card account -- that bus ride might have been more money than you bargained for.

"Untold" numbers of AC Transit customers were overcharged for bus transfers due to a "glitch" in their Clipper Cards, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

AC Transit passengers are supposed to be charged only 25 cents for a bus transfer, according to the newspaper. That's well below the $2.10 normal fare for an AC Transit bus ride.

But for two months, customers using cards were charged an $1.85 fare for a second bus ride or a ride on the bus following a BART ride, for an overcharge of $1.60 per trip, the newspaper reported.

The glitch was discovered in February and fixed in March, according to officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees the Clipper card. But it took some doing, according to the newspaper.

Jonathan Pistorino says he noticed the overcharges only after studying his customer account. He tried several times to get employees at Cubic, the firm that designed the Clipper's software, to fix the problem. He was originally told that no overcharges had happened, and was then offered $30 in repayment, a figure far below the cost of the overcharges, he said.

"They told me repeatedly that nothing was wrong," Pistorino told the newspaper. “Clipper is a great service when it’s working right. But the people running it seemed to have no problem letting the card rip me off."

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