Meet Opus

When Montreal’s new public transit smart card was officially launched in late April, most of its details had already been known for months. There was, however, one surprise: its name, Opus, which was chosen from more than 1,000 proposals and then kept secret for nearly four years.

Many transit users like smart cards because they allow them to store cash value and multiple passes or tickets on a single card. Transit agencies like them because they reduce fraud and make it easier to adjust fares and analyze passenger flow. More than that, though, they are valuable marketing tools. That’s why, in cities around the world, so much emphasis has been placed on coming up with a catchy name to anchor a strong brand identity.

For the Société de transport de Montréal, which led Montreal-area transit agencies in the creation of the new smart card, creating a memorable name was essential.

“Three hundred fifty thousand people buy a métro pass each month and they use it every day. With a smart card, they need to keep the card permanently, so we need to build a relationship between it and the consumer,” STM spokesperson Odile Paradis said in a phone interview. “They need to keep it, take care of it, make it part of their lives. If it didn’t have a name, it would just be an anonymous access card that nobody would care about.”

Opus is being phased in, starting with a small test group now, and expanding to students this summer and the general public in September. The old turnstiles are to be removed next June.

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Charlie on the T

I just got back from Boston, where I spent the weekend riding the subway — known there as the T — with a CharlieCard, the reloadable, contactless smart card that was introduced at the beginning of the year. Montreal’s smart card will be introduced in January, with a full implementation in the spring, but its name still hasn’t been released. There really should have been a competition to determine what it will be called; now we will probably end up with a blandly-named card like Atlanta’s BreezeCard, Paris’ Navigo or Washington, DC’s SmarTrip.

Boston, though, was wise enough to avoid that perilous route. To outsiders, CharlieCard seems like an inexplicably goofy choice of name for an important piece of transportation infrastructure, but it actually has deep roots in the city’s transit heritage. The Charlie in question comes from the 1948 “The MTA Song,” which tells the story of a man named Charlie who was forced to ride the rails for eternity because he forgot to bring an extra five cents to pay for the new exit fare:

Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA

Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
“One more nickel.”
Charlie could not get off that train.

Every day, his wife meets him at Scollay Square where she hands him a sandwich, but apparently she doesn’t mind him being away, because she never sees fit to give him a nickel.

Now all night long
Charlie rides through the tunnels
Saying, “What will become of me?
Crying
How can I afford to see
My sister in Chelsea
Or my cousin in Roxbury?”

Charlie’s wife goes down
To the Scollay Square station
Every day at quarter past two
And through the open window
She hands Charlie a sandwich
As the train comes rumblin’ through.

“The MTA Song,” better known as “Charlie on the MTA,” became a hit in 1959 when it was recorded by the Kingston Trio, a California-based folk act. Over the next few decades, it worked its way into Boston’s popular culture well enough to become the winning nomination for the name of the new smart card that replaced the city’s antiquated token payment system last year. While I was using the card and staring at its cartoon rendition of a jubilant Charlie (happy, I guess, to have his fare pre-loaded on a smart card), I thought about whether it would be possible for something as simple as a smart card to work its way into a city’s public imagination.

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