Catching up to New York, Boston and 21st century public transit, BART is in the testing stages of implementing new tickets with stronger magnetic strips to reduce to a common woe—a dead ticket.

The BART board approved a contract in February for a five-year supply of fare tickets with higher grade magnetic strips to reduce cases of demagnetization. High-coercivity magnetic strips—the kind used on most credit cards—will be less prone to being erased as the low-coercivity tickets currently in use.

BART has since been working on converting the old ticket readers at the stations to work with the new tickets, and now it says it is ahead of schedule.

“We’re in the testing phase right now,” BART Chief Spokesperson Linton Johnson said. “We already have at least one fare gate in each station that accepts high-coercivity (high-c) tickets and we have staff and others testing them.”

Twenty-one percent of SF State students rely on the BART and the free shuttle offered to and from the Daly City station, according to the latest SF State transportation study.

“I’m careful to keep it away from my cell phone now,” said nursing major Emily Hallam, 20, who said she learned that her phone could demagnetize her ticket after only one incident. But others are not always so lucky.

“They will give me another one to get me through the day, but then I have to go downtown to get it replaced,” said SF State biology major Nyada Batieste, 20, who purchases the bulk-rate discounted fare tickets and deals with this about once a month. “It is kind of frustrating that you have to go talk to an agent. It wastes a lot of time.”

BART receives an average of 250 complaints a day about demagnetized tickets, according to Johnson. Daly City BART sees an average of 20 erased tickets in just two hours of the morning rush between 7 and 9 a.m. according to ticket agents.

“We’re hoping to have all our fare gates ready to accept high-c tickets sometime between November and January,” said Johnson. “Once testing is complete, we’ll be ready to put the high-c tickets in our ticket machines for our customers.”

This change is expected to gradually cut down the number of complaints and rider headaches over time.

“As for what the average will be when we convert, that’s difficult to say because there will be the mix of old tickets and the new high-c tickets out in the world for many more years to come,” Johnson said.

“Remember, you can keep a BART ticket forever and whatever money you have on it is good until you use it again. So the average will decrease as more and more of the high-c tickets get used.”

“Our customers will not be able to notice the difference in feel between the low-c and high-c tickets.” Johnson said. “However, we may have a modest design change so customers know whether they have the high-c ticket.”