Go to:

http://www.mbta.com/fares_and_passes/passes/
and click “buy online” link
location of on-page link button varies: far right, or bottom of page.
purchase site: http://commerce.mbta.com/

You will have to “buy” the pass, or passes, then “establish” an account (destination email required), but it does work.

I tto, had done the endlessly repeated query, “Do you have any Charlie Cards, sir” at Oak Grove, North Station and South Station until Idecided to try the online purchase route.
I had a lone personal Charlie Card from January-June 2007, then I tried the online purchase–all is happy.

Good luck.

Either a $5 denomination, or a $10 denomintion are available.
The card (or cards) get mailed to your home (credit card billing) address.
A Wednesday, end-of-day order resulted in a pair of $5 cards in my mailbox in NH by Friday PM.

tried using the machines at the airport 2 years ago when I attended UI10. I think that my friend and I bought tickets but they did not work on the lines in Cambridge and the inner city. It was frustrating because the machine did little to help a new visitor to Boston buy the correct ticket. It was a confusing interface that had too much going on. I hope that in the future they make this a lot more user friendly.

The Metro Transit of Minneapolis - St Paul has a similar disaster that is probably worse:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hause011/article/Bus_ride8.html (an article about RFID usabilty and news articles
documenting the disaster)

They would’ve been better off not putting all the arrows on the machines and replacing them by lights that are off by default .. As long as there’s some process required to do something, you’d have to take the user by the hand along each step .. if the touch-screen would have initially said/blinked/screamed to touch it as the first step, they could have later on shown a picture of the machine itself with encircled parts you’d need to use next .. together with blinking lights near the actual parts while they become available to the user, the process would be way easier ..

The ‘danger’ with these machines also is that experienced users (those that regularly buy the same ticket) act and think faster than the pre-programmed step-by-step process .. In the Netherlands, the old train ticket machines with buttons seemed hard to use but with a little more information on the outside they were better than the slowly reacting touch-screen versions we have now .. With the old machines with real buttons that lit up I could choose my ticket within 5 seconds if I knew the postal code of the station i was travelling to (there was a list of all stations available)!

You should be able to just insert money and have the option of then inserting a ticket to add money, or simply print a new ticket.

Having two slots for tickets and extraneous labels just adds to the confusion. And why is the coin slot so far away from the bill slot?

What really bugs me is that this is not a new problem. I’ve used many automated ticketing systems, and never got stuck like I did here. And some of those other systems were not even in English! I think the real problem with this interface is that what’s presented didn’t match what I expected to see. There were no visual cues that matched with “buy a ticket” anywhere, and the things I did see seemed totally foreign. Even the physical design of this system is horrible. It says ‘ticket’ in 3 different places, and all the arrows indicate whoever designed this was really confused as well.

This system doesn’t appear to do any more than any other automated ticket system. It just seems like the designers didn’t know what they were trying to accomplish, and there is nothing to tie the design as a system together. As a result, it ends up looking like the kitchen sink

The Charlie Card is Boston’s electronic ticketing system for public transportation. I agree with Ashley McKee’s recent post about the limitations of the ticket machine UI. But her gentle criticism doesn’t go nearly far enough. In the old subway syst…