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TriMet fare inspector Chris Young writes a $175 ticket to a woman caught without valid fare on MAX in 2012.

(Joseph Rose/The Oregonian 2012)

Meghan Kelly remembers the first time TriMet froze her debit card. Beyond frustrating and time-draining, it was embarrassing.

After buying a two-week pass with the card at a

vending machine, she went shopping at Trader Joe’s. When the checker had rung up several bags of groceries, Kelly swiped her card over and over, only to be told it had been declined.

“I called the bank and they said they had put a ‘security hold’ on my card,” the 34-year-old caregiver said. “The same thing kept happening after that. Whenever I’d buy a pass from a TriMet machine, my card would get suspended.”

Kelly is far from the only regular transit commuter who has had problems with debit and credit cards automatically getting suspended – or even cancelled – after buying fares at the system’s 215 automated stations.

In fact, after years of blaming overzealous banks spooked

, Oregon’s largest transit agency now says a programming bug on its end erroneously flagged up to 2,500 card transactions a month for fraud over five years.

Chris Tucker, TriMet’s director of revenue operations, said the agency just recently discovered the glitch.

“After addressing it” in January, Tucker said, “fraud declines for credit cards users at our TVMs decreased significantly from 4 percent to 0.3 percent.”

As any rider who has been stalled by a broken ticket vending machine knows, TriMet’s problems with the units extends much further.

OregonâÂÂs largest transit agency now says a programming bug on its end erroneously flagged up to 2,500 card transactions a month for fraud over five years. Brent Wojahn/The Oregonian

The agency spends about $2.5 million a year on TVM maintenance. But as TriMet increasingly

, the agency has conceded that it needs to do a better job of keeping up with outages so that riders can actually buy a ticket when they need one.

“It’s frustrating to you and to us,” the agency said in

posted on its website

about machines failing hundreds of times a year.

Although TriMet put the average reliability rate of its machines at 90 percent, “that’s not the reality customers are experiencing, especially at busier stations,” said agency spokeswoman Roberta Altstadt.

Instead of relying so heavily on the average uptime, the agency promised that it will start digging deeper into the data to find issues and conducting more frequent field audits.

“We need to take a new approach, and we are,” said TriMet General Manager Neil McFarlane. “By moving beyond the data, we can address the frustration many of our riders feel, fix what needs to be fixed and do a better job with our ticket machines.”

TriMet is in the process of replacing 120 older machines. The agency said it has also eliminated a bug called “screen freeze” that caused TVMs to time out.

Still, among many riders, even the 90 percent uptime for TVMs long cited by TriMet isn’t that impressive. The federal benchmark for telecom reliability, for example, is 99.999 percent (or “the five nines.”)

What to do when a TriMet TVM is broken?

• Try other machines at the MAX station, including those on the opposite platform.

• If there’s a bus nearby, buy a ticket with cash from the bus operator.

• TriMet also encourages people to carry around an emergency book of tickets.

• But what if a ticket validator is out of order? TriMet says the best approach is to step off at the next train station and use the one there.

“Every time someone purchases a ticket, there is a one in ten chance the machine will fail,” said John Campbell of Portland. “I can’t easily think of another technology in routine use today that fails as often as one time in ten — even the latest versions of Windows perform much better than that!”

By comparison, TVMs on the

system have a reported uptime of 99.59 percent. Meanwhile, the Portland Bureau of Transportation says its system of 1,343 electronic

operated with a downtime of less than 1 percent in 2012.

Last year, about 54 percent of TriMet’s TVM purchases were made with credit and debit cards.

TriMet assumed problems with riders having cards suspended and cancelled were the result of banks using proprietary fraud filters to stop thieves. Buying a fares and reselling them for a discount at stations is one of the easiest ways to use a pinched card in Portland, police say.

Because TVM transactions do not require interacting with an actual person, credit processor Visa requires it to cover the cost of every ticket purchased with a stolen credit card. In 2012, the last year data is available, the agency ate $95,389 for 1,516 fraudulent transactions.

“Banks will not provide information on individual customer issues,” Altstadt said. “So, it was very difficult to find the root cause.”

But in January, she said, the agency’s technicians found a faulty ZIP code in the machines' software was tripping up information being passed to the banks. A data field was passing something other than TriMet's ZIP code, causing banks to flag the transactions as risky.

It was fixed. By the end of April, Altstadt said, it was clear that reported frauds had dropped dramatically.

Logan Egbert, a daily TriMet rider who works at a downtown public relations firm and dealt with TVM-triggered suspensions for nine months last year, said U.S. Bank told him there appeared to be a ZIP code problem on TriMet’s end.

“It went on forever,” Egbert said. “Every time I bought a monthly transit pass, it would trigger a card suspension.”

After each card freeze, Egbert said he spent about an hour on the phone with his bank. “I’d tell them, ‘There’s going to be this charge on my account every month, so don’t block my card,’” he said. “But the next month, it would happen again.”

TriMet is looking to move to an electronic fare system that would reduce the need for TVMs by 2018. But Kelly said she is done with the machines. She makes the extra trip to the downtown TriMet ticket office.

Sure, she could pay with cash. But the last time Kelly tried that at Northeast Portland’s Hollywood station, she said, “the machine that accepts cash was broken down.”

-- Joseph Rose