Uber Expands Mobile Ticketing to More U.S. Public Transit Agencies

_{(This premium article was originally published in July 2020. © Mobility Payments and Forthwrite Media.)}

As expected, Uber has expanded support for public transit ticketing in its app again, this time to a consortium of 13 small and mid-tier transit agencies in Ohio and Northern Kentucky–following two other U.S. transit agencies, in Denver and Las Vegas, which have already integrated with Uber–it was announced today. 

The public transit ticketing feature in the Uber app, while not widely used, is part of the ride-hailing service’s initiative to incorporate other modes of transit in its app to offer a mobility-as-a-service, or MaaS, platform. MaaS is a much-touted development in the transportation industry that is supposed to enable users to plan, book and pay for door-to-door transit from the same app. But it has so far failed to live up to the hype. 

 Uber launched the service July 15, 2020. Mobility Payments’ sister publication NFC Times earlier reported the planned move in May.

The Ohio-based consortium, called NEORide,is already working with the trip-planning app, Transit, including with its largest agencies serving the Cincinnati metropolitan areas, selling its mobile tickets exclusively through the Transit app. NEORide has also been in talks with trip-planning platform Moovit to sell tickets through the Moovit app. And NEORide launched its own app, Ezfare, last May with a couple of its agencies before more fully rolling out the service by the end of October. It uses a white-label app and software-as-a service platform from UK-based Masabi. Masabi also provides the technology to enable Uber and Transit to support ticketing for NEORide or individual member agencies of the consortium.  

With the Covid-19 pandemic having caused public transit ridership to plummet throughout the U.S. and raising worries that some customers will not return to ride buses, subways and commuter trains as the lockdowns end, transit agencies are looking to promote use of more touch-free options like mobile ticketing. 

Paper tickets and cash are still used most often by customers of the U.S. agencies, although many transit officials waived fares during the pandemic to reduce contact between bus drivers or other transit employees and customers and to allow all parties to avoid handling cash. Some U.S. agencies that reinstated the fares are waiving them again now because of renewed restrictions or lockdowns. 

Katherine Conrad, director of client services for NEORide, who had disclosed the planned integration with Uber during a recent webinar sponsored by Masabi, also said the consortium hopes to enable its customers to purchase tickets through another trip-planning app, Moovit, which was recently acquired by Intel. That agreement wasnot yet finalized. Conrad told NFC Times that the plan is to sell the consortium’s EZfare tickets through Moovit’s own branded app, just as it does through the Transit app and nowthrough Uber. 

The Uber app’s support for public transit ticketing, along with trip planning, in Denver, Las Vegas and now Ohio and Northern Kentucky, uses an SDK for the ticketing piece from Masabi, as does theTransit app’s support for transit ticketing in these and a few other cities. 

More Ticketing Expected from Third-Party Apps
Transit, in a limited number of cities, enables users to pay for use of other transit modes they find during their trip-planning searches in the app. That includes ride-hailing services and bike and scooter rentals. Transit indicated that besides Masabi, it also uses mobile-ticketing technology from another software-as-a-service ticketing platform, U.S.-based Token Transit.  

As NFC Times reported in January, Uber’s own separate “Transit” unit already provides public transit trip planning in its ride-hailing app in 15 North American cities or areas, offering what it says is real-time information and end-to-end directions to users. Both Transit and Uber are expected to add payments and ticketing or passes in more of these cities. 

As NFC Times recently reported, the vast majority of mobile-ticketing transactions for Denver transit agency RTD are still through its own local app, “Mobile Tickets,” which also uses technology from Masabi. As of February, before the Covid-19 lockdowns, less than 3% of all RTD Denver mobile tickets were sold through the Uber app. The rest were through the local app, with a small number sold through the Transit app. That does not count ticketing that the majority of customers used for their pre-Covid-19 trips on RTD buses and trains–that is, closed-loop smart cards and cash.  

The situation is different for the NEORide consortium, which sees sales of more than 60% of its mobile tickets through the Transit app, the rest through the separate EZfare app. That’s because the largest transit provider in the group, Cincinnati Metro, a bus operator overseen by the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, sells all of its mobile EZfare tickets through the Transit app, which also gives users trip planning and real-time tracking. 

All told, there were a total of 68,300 EZfare tickets sold by NEORide in December, when all or nearly all of the group’s 13 agencies were on board with the mobile-ticketing service. Just under 43,400 of those tickets were sold through the Transit app. Total mobile ticket sales increased by 20% to 82,000 the next month, January, with 52,000 of those tickets sold through Transit. Ticket sales dipped by 6% to 7% to 77,000 in February, the last full month unaffected by the pandemic lockdowns. 

NEORide pays Masabi a fee of 7.9% of the amount of each transaction, which also covers the cost of credit card fees charged by banks when customers buy their mobile tickets in the app, according to Conrad. Masabi, along with such fare-payments-as-a-service suppliers as Cubic-owned Delerrok and Token Transit, are believed to be seeing increased demand in the wake of the pandemic from transit agencies that want to move quickly to mobile- and contactless card-based ticketing to reduce their usage of cash, as NFC Times recently reported.

Plans for Contactless EMV 
Riders display the Masabi-enabled mobile tickets to bus drivers for visual inspection or, if scanners are available, have QR codes in the tickets scanned. But Conrad said NEORide plans to also enable riders to also pay fares with contactless smart cards, tying into Masabi’s Justride fare-payments-as-a-service platform. The consortium is now equipping buses with more than 1,000 validators using grant funds. The readers in the validators will accept closed-loop cards and will be ready to also take contactless EMV credit and debit cards and card credentials stored on NFC devices. The planned expansion to cards predated the pandemic. 

Denver transit agency RTD also plans to add open-loop payments as an option, which would include accepting such NFC payments services as Apple Pay and Google Pay. 

And Calgary Transit in Canada, which recently launched its first electronic ticketing service with the My Fare appfrom Masabi,also plans to eventually support open-loop payments. But despite a push by transit agencies to eliminate cash as an option for their customers to pay fares in North America and beyond in the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdowns, a spokeswoman for Calgary Transit told NFC Times there are no plans to phase out cash or paper in Calgary.  

Masabi cannot yet support contactless EMV payments in its platform in North America, so the service in Calgary, Denver and Ohio and Northern Kentucky will not launch in the immediate future. 

© Mobility Payments and Forthwrite Media. Mobility Payments content is for individual use and cannot be copied or distributed without the express permission of the publisher.