Commentary

An App That Lets You Buy a Bus Ticket - Anywhere in the World

Public transportation agencies are hopping on the mobile ticketing bandwagon -- well, more like lumbering on -- but for the most part their efforts haven’t been coordinated, with each city’s system offering its own dedicated app. A few city and regional systems have joined forces on mobile ticketing -- but even in San Francisco, that shining mobile beacon on a hill, Muni’s new mobile payment system doesn’t work with BART (yet).

A new European alliance is aiming to change all that, by introducing a global standard for mobile ticketing services using near-field communication (NFC). The aim is to create a single app that allows passengers to purchase public transportation tickets on their mobile devices and use them anywhere in the world: essentially a “roaming” network for buses, trains, ferries, and so on.

The Open Mobile Ticketing Alliance includes Verifone Mobile and transport service providers Scheidt & Bachmann and Thales, which have set out to develop interoperable standards for payment vendors and transit operators. The alliance hopes to begin trials of products based on the OMTA standards by the end of the year, touting a number of advantages including passenger convenience and lower fare collection costs for transit authorities.

There’s no question that public transportation plays an increasingly important role in economic and leisure activities around the world. In the U.S., from 1995 to 2014, total public transit ridership increased 39% to a record 10.8 billion trips in the latter year, according to the American Public Transportation Association. In the European Union, passengers made 57 billion local public transportation trips in 2012, the highest figure since 2000. And from 2012-2013, ridership aboard the Beijing Subway jumped 30%, to 3.2 billion trips.

Transit agencies aren’t the only ones trying to keep pace with mobile trends. Last year the New York City Department of Finance released a request for information from vendors about a proposed mobile payments system for parking tickets.

2 comments about "An App That Lets You Buy a Bus Ticket - Anywhere in the World".
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  1. mike boland from BIA/Kelsey, July 17, 2015 at 12:19 p.m.

    Great timing for this Eric. Though not techincally public transit, I had quite an encounter last week with the mobile site and app for Peter Pan Bus lines. Long story short, I would advise to not use the mobile site unless you're in a padded area to protect all of the walls and windows you'll want to punch after trying to buy a ticket. I've never encountered a company that makes it harder to give them money. As one small example, the company doesn't accept tickets (while boarding) on a mobile screen. Only printed copies. Yes really. I predict we'll be reading the company's eulogy sometime in the next five years, as companies who have accepted to live in this century (Megabus, et al) will take market share. This may sound like a customer rant but it's also -- with my industry analyst hat on -- a public service announcement to both consumers and businesses whose transactions are increasingly mobile. I have a post in the works for the BIA/Kelsey blog to tell the whole story. More to come. 

  2. mike boland from BIA/Kelsey, July 17, 2015 at 12:23 p.m.

    (sorry, Erik (sp))

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