As the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, sees it, the state’s more than 300 local transit agencies offer a fragmented and inefficient mix of fare collection systems–a fact it says discourages many potential riders among the state’s nearly 40 million residents from taking public transit.
The solution the state has come up with–creating a “marketplace” of vendors that can offer “plug-and-play” components to transit agencies–could change the way agencies procure their fare-collection systems in the future, say backers of CalTrans’ Integrated Travel Project, or Cal-ITP.
“Think of (it as) the California ‘mobility marketplace,’ and it is the desire to make sure that it is plug and play,” said Matthew Hudson, a lead at Netherlands-based consulting company Rebel Group and a consultant for the state, speaking at a recent Transport Ticketing Digital Summit conference. He noted that “demonstration” projects, like the pilot of EMV contactless fare payments launched in May by a small bus operator serving California’s central valley and coastal region, Monterey-Salinas Transit, have proved the concept. Cal-ITP launched its second demo project June 29 on the Sacramento Regional Transit light rail service.
