Getting Around: Sacramento, CA

Traveled May 2025

Confusion

If anyone ever tells you that transit is too confusing to ride, don’t dismiss their concerns. I’ve ridden transit in dozens of cities, and gotten pretty confident in my skills. Confident enough that I’ve become complacent, done less and less research the more I traveled. Surely I’ve seen everything and can figure everything out in a pinch, right?

WRONG!

Now, before I talk a bunch of trash on Sacramento, I will mention that they have improvements in the works. The improvements may even be finished by the time you read this. There are plans to switch everything to a tap-to-ride system like in Chicago and NYC, and some of those improvements have already rolled out.

Website

The website shows four different ways to buy tickets: Connect Transit Card, ZipPass App, Fare Vending Machines, and Tap2Ride. Naturally, I thought the first one would be the recommended one. Right?

WRONG!

The first option was a Connect Transit Card. The site lists what look like four easy steps to get started.

The first step: Go through the “Get a Card” process.

So already, the first step is lots of steps. Not a great start. There was also no link labeled “Get a Card.”

I clicked “Discover Benefits.”

It led me to a page with an “Order a New Card” link.

Only 7-10 days before you can ride, wow!

For a site with the tagline “The Easy Way to Pay,” this seemed rather difficult to set up.

Poked around a while longer, but apparently this is a whole thing you apply for, and once approved, wait a week or so for it to be mailed to you.

Not for visitors.

Not gonna arrive in the next 10 minutes.

Mind you, I’ve grabbed these screenshots from the desktop site after the fact. At the time, I was trying to figure it out on my phone, as I sat on an Amtrak from Richmond rapidly approaching Sacramento.

The next option was ZipPass app. Before digging deep into that, I scrolled down to see two further options: Fare Vending Machines and Tap2Ride.

Tap2Ride

The website said I could tap as I boarded at any light rail station.

Sounds easy, right?

There will be a card reader at the stations, right?

WRONG!

This is a Tap2Ride card reader (on an Amtrak Capitol Corridor train).

This is the vending machine at a light rail station. Notice the lack of Tap2Ride reader.

Maybe this is a Tap2Ride reader?

No, it’s a reader for the Connect Transit Card, which you have to apply for and wait a week or two to get it mailed out.

I don’t know if the website people got ahead of themselves, or if the tap terminals have some amazing camouflage, but tap to pay was not available at any station I visited.

The countdown displays at the stations even said you could tap to ride. But there was nowhere to tap. The closest thing that was available was a tap reader to pay credit for a paper ticket after going through several layers of menus on the ticket machine. That is not tap to ride.

So I ended up at the station looking everywhere for a place to tap my card or phone, and nowhere to do it.

ZipPass App

I started to set up the ZipPass app, and it needed a bunch of information to set up. It didn’t take Apple Pay, so I’d have to take my credit card out and enter all the numbers manually.

I’ve filled out my full address and billing info in so many transit apps, and I am tired. There are so many better ways to handle this.

I also wasn’t too thrilled about taking my credit card out in the somewhat… crunchy… surroundings of that particular light rail station.

The train arrived while I was still fumbling with the app. For legal purposes, I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out my payment situation for that trip.

Machines

Later, I tried to figure out the ticket machines, and just… yikes.

• There were Tickets.
• There were Passes.
• There were a couple greyed-out options, including Connect.
• There was “Tap your ConnectCard on the target” (which was located elsewhere, but I guess they just wanted to tell you about it on the machine).
• There were two “barcode functions”, one for ZipPass, and one Pre Paid.

Help?

I picked ZipPass Barcode Function. YOLO, right? The vending machine then took my money and printed out this… thing. I can use it to board, right?

WRONG!

Printed in big friendly letters, the paper I just bought read: THIS IS NOT A TICKET.

Just… why?

Why not just be a ticket?

Who made this up?

What is the use case here?

So how it works is you buy a voucher, which has a number on it. Then you physically open the ZipPass app, and enter the voucher number into the app, and then you have a ticket available in the app.

I probably should have selected Tickets.

The machine should probably direct people who don’t know what they’re doing to Tickets.

Trains

The light rail train was fine. I wish it ran much more often. When I left town, I just walked back to the Amtrak station because it was faster than waiting on a train.

As one of the older light rail systems, some of the trains have seen better days.

Done

I was tired, I was hungry, I was battling insomnia, and I was just super frustrated with my transit experience. I was just completely done. So that’s as much transit as I did on this visit.

I wandered around old town, which was a bit more tourist-trappy than I remembered, but did have a good little pinball bar (not pictured).

I was going to take the bus to a gym but I ended up just staying near the hotel, grabbing a bite at a mediterranean place, walking around downtown (which gets sketch at night), and calling it a day with a cocktail at the hotel’s rooftop bar.

Sacramento definitely felt like a “the cool places are away from downtown” city like Albuquerque. I’ll give it another shot some time, with more research ahead of time.