NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – The Regional Transportation District of Denver was the first transit agency to work with Uber to sell its bus and light rail tickets through the Uber app in the spring of 2019. RTD later that year expanded the service to trip-planning app Transit and then last fall to the app for another ride-hailing service, Lyft.
Still, after two years working with third-party apps, the vast majority of RTD’s customers still use the U.S. agency’s own white-label app, launched in the fall of 2017, for mobile ticketing. RTD’s “Mobile Tickets” app accounted for more than 95% of mobile-ticket sales for the year ending February 2021. The other three apps, Uber, Transit and Lyft, made up the rest. (See chart below). RTD notes that, overall, mobile ticketing has greatly exceeded expectations and the agency says it will continue to offer customers various options to pay for their rides.
RTD also plans to launch a mobility-as-a-service, or MaaS, offer with a software-as-a-service ticketing platform from UK-based Masabi. Masabi also provides the ticketing and payments for the RTD local Mobile Tickets app, along with the integrations with RTD for ticketing and payments in the Uber, Transit and Lyft apps.
