NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Multimodal trip-planning apps Moovit and Transit have introduced ticketing and payments in their apps for another North American transit agency, following an emerging trend for trip-planning apps to enable users to plan, book and pay for their rides all in one place. The app providers are offering the extra service as they seek ways to give users a better mobility-as-a-service experience.
The latest agency to sell tickets this way is the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, or NFTA, which provides around 25 million rides per year for the Buffalo, New York, region. Transit, which began offering ticketing and payments last year, already offers the service in its app in such North American cities as Denver, St. Louis, Montréal and for the Ohio-based transit agency consortium NEORide, which now incorporates 14 agencies. Intel-owned Moovit, which bills itself as the largest urban mobility app globally, announced last month that it had also enabled ticketing for NEORide, which includes Cincinnati Metro.
In addition, ride-hailing service Uber also has incorporated ticketing for the NEORide group in its app through Uber's transit unit. Uber enables public transit ticketing to at least two other agencies, in Denver and Las Vegas. And as NFC Times has reported, Google Maps is testing ticketing and payments for public transit agencies in the app, with the payments piece provided by Google Pay.
