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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has hit its major rollout milestones for its OMNY open-loop fare-collection system, despite dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since launching in May 2019, OMNY has recorded more than 19.5 million taps. That compares with 4 million taps for OMNY by mid-December 2019, before the pandemic. OMNY users now tap their contactless bank cards or NFC wallets around 110,000 times on an average weekday, with taps increasing every week, the MTA noted.
• MTA
• Cubic
(This premium article was originally published in September 2020. © Mobility Payments and Forthwrite Media.)
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says it is seeing steady growth in use of its OMNY open-loop fare payments system by customers–though overall open-loop payments remain small–as the agency continues its phased rollout of acceptance of contactless EMV bank cards and NFC Pays wallets.
The MTA disclosed usage results Tuesday in announcing it had completed a major phase of the project–installation of contactless EMV readers and validators on gates at more than 150 subway stations and on board more than 800 buses in Manhattan. That follows rollout of contactless acceptance at subway stations in the Bronx and on buses and rail in Staten Island, New York City’s two smallest boroughs or districts.
The two largest boroughs by population, Brooklyn and Queens, will be completed by the end of the year, vowed Al Putre, OMNY executive, at a press conference Tuesday. In it, he noted that the rollout was still on time and on budget. “Even the pandemic can’t stop the OMNY express,” he said, adding that with the Manhattan subway stations enabled, it means that just under three-quarters of New York City’s 472 subway stations are now live for contactless EMV payments.
The US$540 million-plus OMNY project, being implemented by U.S.-based automated fare collection vendor Cubic Transportation Systems, is being closely watched. New York’s MTA is by far the largest public transit system in the U.S., and contactless payments backers, such as payments networks Visa and Mastercard, believe strong take-up for OMNY will translate into more use of contactless bank cards and NFC wallets by consumers in stores and other retail outlets. That’s in addition to the bump in usage contactless payments is seeing at retail because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Tuesday, the MTA released figures showing that since launching in May 2019, the OMNY open-loop fare payments system has recorded more than 19.5 million taps. That compares with 4 million taps for OMNY by mid-December 2019, before the pandemic.
OMNY users now tap their contactless bank cards or NFC wallets around 110,000 times on an average weekday, with taps increasing every week, the MTA noted.
That still works out to only a small percentage–around 1%–of the nearly 9.5 million trips that the MTA records each day–just under 80% of them on New York City’s large subway system.
Of course, one quarter of the subway stations are still not yet equipped for OMNY and even a higher percentage of buses still lack OMNY readers. Putre said Tuesday that the agency is seeing 1% growth per month of use of contactless bank cards and NFC wallets.
In addition, looking at OMNY-enabled stations only, customers were using OMNY instead of the agency’s mag-strip MetroCard more and more, over a six-month period ending last month. As of August 2020, 8.6% of customers were using OMNY with the rest swiping the MetroCard. That OMNY “market share” is up from 4.4% in February 2020, said the agency.
And OMNY doesn’t yet support reduced fares for senior citizens, students and the disabled like MetroCard does. That is planned. OMNY doesn’t support fare capping, either, but time-based fare products are planned for OMNY, as well.
Putre urged riders to be patient Tuesday at his press conference. “As you all know, this is a design-build project broken down into five individual phases,” he said. “Everything that MetroCard does, OMNY will do.”
In all, a little more than 1.7 million unique bank cards or NFC devices have been tapped since the launch of OMNY, said the agency Tuesday, though it didn’t release the share of transactions for NFC devices versus bank cards.
While support for open-loop is definitely a trend in the U.S. and globally–following the success of the large open-loop rollout in London six years ago–some transit agencies are opting to promote and expand their closed-loop fare payment systems instead of supporting open loop.
The agencies balking at open-loop say the option is expensive and does not eliminate the need for maintaining their established separate closed-loop card systems for customers who have no bank cards or don’t want to use them for fares. In addition, it’s more difficult to support concessionary fares for senior citizens, students and disabled persons with open-loop cards.
Among the agencies sticking with their closed-loop contactless fare cards, at least for now, are those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are promoting their Mifare-based closed-loop cards, TAP and Clipper, respectively, as Mobility Payments sister publication has reported.
That was not an option for transit officials in New York, who didn’t have a viable closed-loop card to promote. The mag-stripe MetroCard is more than 25 years old and had to go. The MTA will issue a closed-loop OMNY card for customers who can’t or won’t use bank cards. And it will retire the MetroCard for good in 2023.
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