12 Facts About Clipper card

Clipper card is a reloadable contactless smart card used for automated fare collection in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Clipper card is accepted by nearly all public transit services in the Bay Area, including Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit, Golden Gate Ferry, San Francisco Bay Ferry, VTA, and many others.

The Clipper card, which used magnetic stripe technology, was envisioned to one day include all Bay Area transit agencies.

The contract with Cubic for the existing Clipper card system expired in 2019, and the system architecture dates from the 1990s.

In December 2020, BART announced that it had converted all of its ticket machines to Clipper card-only, discontinuing the sale of paper magstripe tickets that had been used since the system's inception in the 1970s.

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In March 2022, Clipper announced that its older card readers were to be replaced soon, and that the new readers would not be backwards-compatible with TransLink cards.

The Bay Pass provides free unlimited rides on Clipper card-enabled transit systems to a subset of students at participating educational institutions.

The $3 fee is waived if the Clipper card is registered for Autoload at the time of purchase .

Clipper card is currently accepted on 24 Bay Area transit services:.

Clipper card is not accepted on Amtrak California's Capitol Corridor or San Joaquins trains, despite these serving the Bay Area.

For each of these systems, the Clipper card is used not for payment but only as a key; users must have a credit or debit card linked to their Bay Wheels or BikeLink account, and usage fees are charged to this linked payment card, not deducted from the Clipper card's stored value.

Clipper card operates in multiple geographical areas with sporadic or non-existent internet access, the fare collection and verification technology needs to operate without any networking.