NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Another transit agency in Canada has announced it will enable mobile ticketing, along with reloadable contactless cards, citing in part the Covid-19 pandemic and the desire to reduce the use of cash, vending machines and customer interaction with agency staff.
Saskatoon Transit, which serves the largest city in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, plans to launch mobile ticketing and contactless smart cards using a cloud-based ticketing platform-a software-as-a-service system–from UK-based Masabi. It follows the launch of a much larger service by Calgary Transit, which serves Canada’s third largest city, as NFC Times reported in July. Like Calgary Transit, Saskatoon Transit will install validators on its fleet of buses through Masabi.
The validators will be able to scan 2-D bar codes that users will display on their smartphone screens to redeem a ticket or pass. Besides its own mobile app, the new ticketing system will also be incorporated in the trip-planning Transit app, which Saskatoon Transit riders will be able to use to plan their bus trips and also buy tickets in the app, using an SDK from Masabi. Other global trip-planning apps, such as Moovit and Google Maps are also moving to support payments and ticketing in their apps for local public transit rides, with U.S. and Canadian transit agencies the first to enable the service.
