NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Officials in California’s Central Valley have launched an app that enables users to buy mobile tickets for bus and rail rides with seven mostly small public transit agencies, with plans to expand to ticketing for electronic car and bike sharing, along with on-demand ride-sharing and van-pool services.
The project could represent an emerging trend for small to mid-tier public transit agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere to launch mobile ticketing as part of a group. The launch of the EZHub mobile-ticketing service in California this month by the seven agencies–organized by the San Joaquin Council of Governments–follows a larger grouping of public transit agencies serving parts of the U.S. states of Ohio, Kentucky which launched mobile ticketing last year. The latter group, the NEORide consortium, has also extended its ticketing service to trip-planning apps Transit, and more recently, Moovit and the transit unit of Uber, as NFC Times has reported. The group also has expanded to a public transit agency in a third state, Michigan.
The ticketing services allow small agencies to join with others in their region to offer customers interoperable ticketing while sharing costs. In the EZHub project in California, for example, users can buy tickets to ride on regional bus and train services in addition to rides within cities and towns participating in the service.
