Transit Agency to Enable Cash Loading, Fare Capping with Mobile Ticketing

Jiawangkun

Another public transit agency plans to enable customers to load value to their mobile accounts at retail locations and to buy tickets through both a local app and the trip-planning Transit app.

San Antonio, Texas, bus and transit operator VIA Metropolitan Transit, which replaced its mobile-ticketing application with a new one called VIA goMobile+, plans to enable users to load cash at hundreds of retail outlets starting this fall.

UK-based Masabi, which provides the ticketing platform for the new app, earlier told Mobility Payments that expanding funding options for users to cash loading of accounts was a key goal of transit agencies it serves. Most users buy tickets and passes and add value, where available mainly with stored credit and debit cards. VIA has a separate contactless goCard and also accepts paper tickets and cash on at least some of its vehicles.

As Mobility Payments reported, a small but growing number of agencies are using cash points networked by fintech companies such as InComm Payments and T-Cetra in the U.S. and Payzone in the UK. Combined with ticket machines and some counters in stations, this enables customers to buy and reload tickets, passes or value outside of vehicles. These measures are seen as reducing risks of the spread of the coronavirus on vehicles. In addition, transit agencies are seeking to accommodate their customers who are unbanked and underbanked, along with those who wish to pay cash.

Among those agencies using cash loading at retail outlets as a way of ridding its buses of cash is the Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority, which has set a goal for ending cash acceptance on its transit vehicles by Nov. 1. The agency began enabling customers to use a network of cash-acceptance points by fintech T-Cetra at retail outlets in Dayton. That network now encompasses 300 outlets in the county RTA serves, 200 within a quarter mile of the nearest bus route.

But the Dayton RTA is one of the few agencies Masabi serves that supports account-based ticketing and enables reloadable contactless cards, in addition to mobile fare payments on the SaaS platform. Validators on board vehicles accept the contactless cards and can scan QR codes in the mobile tickets in the Transit app, which RTA uses as its default ticketing app. RTA also supports fare capping.

For now, at least, VIA Metro Transit in San Antonio only enables mobile ticketing validated by visual inspection by drivers. It plans to offer fare capping later. And the agency’s contactless goCard does not appear to be linked in any way to the mobile platform.

VIA actually launched the new mobile app July 28, and customers can use it to pay for rides on fixed-route buses, on-demand vehicles and paratransit. It replaced an app that was reportedly launched in 2017, using technology from Germany-based Moovel.

VIA provided 37 million rides in 2019, before the pandemic. Customers can’t move their tickets from the old app to the new one, and have to use the old tickets by early next month–a rule that has not gone over well with some customers.

VIA’s mobile ticketing is now also available in the trip-planning Transit app, which has enabled more than 50 transit agencies to sell tickets through its app, working with Masabi and another software-as-a-service ticketing vendor, Token Transit, as well as Bytemark.

Transit said VIA customers will have an “all-in-one,” experience combining mobile ticketing with “trip planning, real-time tracking, and connections to first-mile/last-mile services.”

But public transit ticket sales in third-party apps, like Transit, have been low for at least some agencies if those agencies had promoted a separate local ticketing app earlier and if they do not make the third-party app a default for ticketing.

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