NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – With public transit ridership decreasing in most large U.S. cities over the past five years, transit authorities are more open to becoming part of Mobility-as-a-Service platforms, which could potentially increase ridership for their rail and bus networks while offering customers options for the first and last mile.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – More and more Chinese cities are trialing use of facial recognition technology for transit ticketing, a development that could enable users to avoid either cards or smartphones to pay fares on subways and other modes of transit.
NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – After being beaten by rival handset makers Huawei, Xiaomi and even Samsung to the launch of NFC transit ticketing in China, Apple today finally began enabling riders in two major cities, Beijing and Shanghai, to tap to pay fares using closed-loop transit ticketing cards.
NFC TIMES Exclusive –Chinese payments and mobile companies continue to look for ways to enable transit ticketing with smartphones, with projects in progress or expected using host card emulation, embedded secure elements and possibly even another contactless SIM from China Mobile, NFC Times has learned.
Five or six years ago, transit ticketing was predicted by many to become first big application service providers would launch when NFC rolled out commercially.
In about two weeks, Transport for London expects to record its one-millionth ride paid for by contactless bank cards, and the authority says it’s on track to hit its deadline for launching open-loop fare collection on the rest of its transit network, including the busy London Underground, by the end of the year.
More than 100 users in a 10-month trial of NFC transit ticketing in Málaga, Spain, tapped for a total of 7,500 rides and got information from smart posters at bus stops more than 3,000 times, France Telecom-Orange has announced.
Chicago transit officials unveiled their planned open-loop fare-collection system, called Ventra, with plans to enable riders to tap to pay fares with contactless credit and debit cards, as well as reloadable MasterCard-branded prepaid cards.
France’s much-anticipated NFC demonstration project scheduled to launch Friday in Nice will feature a variety of applications, including bank payment. But the premier service is expected to be transit ticketing.
Plans by Transport for New South Wales, Australia’s largest transit agency, to launch a trial enabling users to plan, book and pay for multimodal rides is the next step toward the agency’s long-ter
Updated: The Spokane Transit Authority in Washington state confirmed that its new fare-collection system will include contactless open-loop payments–with a beta test planned for next October, a spokesman told NFC Times' sister publication Mobility Payments.
The UK government’s plan to equip 700 rail stations over the next three years to accept contactless open-loop payments is a major initiative, as it seeks to replicate the success of London’s contactless pay-as-you go fare payments system elsewhere in the country–a goal that has proved elusive in the past.
A fourth city in Finland is beginning to roll out contactless open-loop payments, with “more in the pipeline,” according to one supplier on the project, making the Nordic country one of the latest hotspots for the technology.
Moscow Metro is recruiting more users to test its “Virtual Troika” card in two NFC wallets, those supporting Google Pay and Samsung Pay, as one of the world’s largest subway operators continues to seek more ways for its customers to pay for rides.
The Central Ohio Transit Authority, or COTA, officially launched its new digital-payments service Monday, including a fare-capping feature that the agency estimates will cost it $1.8 million per year in lost fare revenue, the agency confirmed to Mobility Payments.
As more transit agencies introduce open-loop fare payments, interest is starting to grow in use of white-label EMV cards that agencies can issue in place of proprietary closed-loop cards for riders who don’t have bank cards or don’t want to use them to pay fares.
Skånetrafiken, the transit agency serving one of Sweden’s largest counties, announced today it has expanded its contactless open-loop payments service to include the Express Mode feature for Apple Pay.
Two more bus operators in Hong Kong on Saturday launched acceptance of open-loop contactless fare payments, with both also accepting QR code-based mobile ticketing–as the near ubiquitous closed-loop Octopus card continues to see more competition.
Touting it as the largest rollout of biometric payments in the world, Moscow Metro launched its high-profile “Face Pay” service Friday, as expected, and predicted that 10% to 15% would regularly us
Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, whose metropolitan area is home to more than 30 million people, is notorious for its stifling traffic congestion. In response, the government metro and light-rail networks and now it is funding an expansion of the fare-collection system to enable more multimodal payments and to build a mobility-as-a-service platform.
Transit agencies that have rolled out open-loop contactless payments are seeing growing use of NFC wallets to pay fares, as Covid-wary passengers see convenience in tapping their phones or wearables to pay.
