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.