NFC TIMES Exclusive – As expected, Uber today has expanded support for public transit ticketing in its app again, this time to a consortium of 13 small and mid-tier transit agencies in Ohio and Northern Kentucky–following two other U.S. transit agencies, in Denver and Las Vegas, which have already integrated with Uber–it was announced today. NFC Times had reported the planned move in late May.
The public transit ticketing feature in the Uber app, while not widely used, is part of the ride-hailing service’s initiative to incorporate other modes of transit in its app to offer a mobility-as-a-service, or MaaS, platform. MaaS is a much-touted development in the transportation industry that is supposed to enable users to plan, book and pay for door-to-door transit from the same app. But it has so far failed to live up to the hype.
As NFC Times earlier reported, the Ohio-based consortium, called NEORide,is already working with the trip-planning app, Transit, including with its largest agencies serving the Cincinnati metropolitan areas, selling its mobile tickets exclusively through the Transit app. NEORide has also been in talks with trip-planning platform Moovit to sell tickets through the Moovit app. And NEORide launched its own app, Ezfare, last May with a couple of its agencies before more fully rolling out the service by the end of October. It uses a white-label app and software-as-a service platform from UK-based Masabi. Masabi also provides the technology to enable Uber and Transit to support ticketing for NEORide or individual member agencies of the consortium.
