Most mid-tier transit agencies in the U.S., like the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, or SORTA, in Cincinnati, still have to deal with high usage of cash and paper tickets on board their buses and other transit vehicles, even as the continuing pandemic increases pressure on them to move to more electronic forms of fare payments. […]
It’s no secret that interest is growing in “touchless transit” in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. So technologies that enable fully hands-free fare payments, letting passengers be-in/be-out, or BIBO, are getting a serious look–as transit agencies seek to let more customers bring their own fare media and minimize passenger interaction with agency staff. […]
EasyCard Corp., Taiwan’s dominant transit e-purse, is not worried about fintechs taking away a significant share of its fare payments business and, in fact, is in talks to work with the country’s most popular e-payments fintech, Jkopay, the head of EasyCard said. […]
Moscow Metro said today it has increased the number of lines supporting a large test of its “Face Pay” service to more than half of its total lines. The metro system, one of the largest in the world, remains on track to roll out the service across the entire metro this year. […]
Switzerland-based start-up Fairtiq said transactions for its fare-payments technology have more than double since February, as Covid-wary riders continue to seek what they consider to be more hygienic payments methods, as well as more pay-as-you-go options. […]
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. […]
UK-based software-as-a-service ticketing provider Masabi said it is targeting large transit agencies in the U.S. and beyond, seeking to sell the agencies on plugging into its SaaS platform rather than building what Masabi contends are expensive and often protracted bespoke fare-collection systems, the vendor told Mobility Payments. […]
Moscow Metro announced that it is officially testing facial recognition-based fare payments at turnstiles, with plans to roll out the technology by the end of the year. […]
Despite the growing popularity of contactless, NFC and QR-code technologies for electronic fare-collection systems, some transit agencies are experimenting with other technologies to collect fares. That includes Germany’s Stadtwerke Osnabrück, which launched the first check-in/be-out system in the country last October in the city of Osnabrück. […]
The trip-planning Transit app announced that it has handled more than 1 million fare transactions since April 2019, when it started enabling ticketing and payments through its app. Although ticketing through third-party apps still make up a small percentage of fare payments for agencies, Transit says the transactions are growing rapidly. […]
