Dallas Latest City in U.S. to Accept Open-Loop Fare Payments

Heinerle

Dallas Area Rapid Transit, or DART, has become the latest transit agency in the U.S. to accept contactless open-loop payments, joining just four other U.S. agencies that support the technology, not counting small open-loop pilots happening in California.

DART has long been planning to move to open loop, along with support for account-based ticketing–with automated fare-collection vendor Vix Technology first announcing its contract to deliver the technology in late 2015.

DART will continue to support its well-used closed-loop reloadable fare card, GoPass Tap, along with its GoPass App for mobile ticketing. The agency also still sells separate daily, monthly, single-ride and a few other passes to customers, including on board buses with cash.

With account-based ticketing, DART could introduce other payments options. But the agency is seeking to make contactless payments attractive to customers, offering daily and monthly fare capping for users who register their payment cards. It’s the same fare-capping deals that DART offers to users of the closed-loop GoPass Tap card.

DART is supporting contactless EMV credit and debit cards across  four payments brands, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover; along with four digital wallets linked to NFC-enabled smartphones and smartwatches–Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay and Fitbit Pay.

To support open-loop, DART equipped its fleet of buses and platforms at light-rail stations with contactless readers on validators or terminals. DART has nearly 700 buses and around 65 light-rail station platforms. It also has a small number of streetcars that have also been outfitted for contactless.

DART delivered 39.7 million trips in 2020, nearly all of it on buses and light rail. That was down by more than 40% from its pre-pandemic ridership totals in 2019, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

DART is the third mid-tier agency in the U.S. to support open loop, following TriMet in Portland, OR; and Miami-Dade Transit in Florida. DART is the smallest of the three agencies in terms of ridership. Big transit agencies in Chicago and New York also support open-loop payments, as does TransLink in Vancouver in Canada. Agencies serving Boston and Philadelphia are planning to launch acceptance of open loop.

But some other large U.S. agencies, those serving Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, have opted to hold off on backing open-loop payments, at least for now, and are developing their closed-loop cards, instead.

In Europe, where public transit is much more well-developed than in North America, transit agencies and operators in a number of major cities already accept contactless EMV credit and debit cards and NFC wallets for payments, including London, Rome, Brussels, Madrid, Prague, Milan, Stockholm and Moscow. A number of smaller European cities also support contactless. In Asia-Pacific, there are only a handful of countries with open-loop fare payments service running, mainly in Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, China and to some extent, India.

Some other U.S. transit agencies plan to also accept EMV cards and wallets for fares. And the state government in the largest state in the U.S., California, has a program to help small agencies procure technology to accept open loop.

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