MasterCard, Visa, and Amex cards replace the ticket in high-profile public transportation trials

By Andy Williams, Contributing Editor

A new way of riding the rails and roads–or rather paying for those trips–may be in the wind at two transit agencies across the country from each other. Both involve contactless payments, but what sets these initiatives apart from contactless fare collection programs around the country and world is the use of branded payment cards (e.g. MasterCard, Visa, American Express).

Most transit agencies–or their vendor of choice–issue their own cards, process their own transactions, and handle their own settlement. But what if this effort was handled by traditional payment card issuers and processors? That is the question that transit managers in New York and Utah set out to answer.

The Island of Capri is located just south of Naples on Italy’s beautiful Amalfi Coast. The island is only 6.7 km (4 miles) long and 2.7 km (1.5 miles) wide and has fewer than 15,000 residents with residing primarily in the two main towns of Capri and Anacapri. But while it may be small in size and population, it is immense in history, beauty, and tourist appeal. Each year, 7 million visitors flock to Capri to enjoy its beaches, visit its historical sites, and explore its renowned Blue Grotto.

This month the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) selected ERG Transit Systems and Northrop Grumman IT to install and operate a new Regional Customer Service Center for its smart card-based fare collection system, known as SmarTrip.

I, like you, have spent a disproportionate percentage of my life on college campuses. Through my work, I have spent time on literally hundreds of campuses around the country and even abroad.   Each campus is unique, each has its own personality, each has things that make it special and set it apart from the crowd.   But one thing remains constant across virtually every campus I have visited ... parking is a pain.

It is not uncommon for a college campus to have less than one parking space for every ten students. Add faculty and staff, visitors, and vendors to that equation and it is easy to see why a parking is among the top complaints and concerns on campus today. Multimillion dollar parking garages, land grabs, and restrictive policies are common fixes though it can be argued that such attempts are band-aids rather than solutions. Can a solution be found in technology? And does the campus card play a role? Some think the answer to both of these questions is yes.

Does your company offer parking access and/or payment solutions?

How can campus card administrators make a difference in the crucial campus service issue of parking?

Mass transportation in Paris, France is big business. In fact, the Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), Paris’ mass transit authority, is the third largest transport network in the world trailing only Tokyo and New York. The RATP also is a world leader in automated fare collection technology with one of the most advanced networks in the world.

Fortress GB Limited, ERG Transit Systems, and Inside Contactless were among the top winners of the SESAMES awards, presented during the CARTES and IT Security 2003 conference in Paris last week. The competition is open to all international industry players: manufacturers, users, integrators, and developers.

Airports have been avid and progressive users of security and identification technologies for many years. Some of the early implementations of smart card, biometric, and RFID technologies have occurred at these hubs of modern global enterprise. By their nature, airports attract a diverse group of visitors from around the world–people with the best of intentions as well as those with bad intentions.

Electronic ticketing systems have rapidly developed due to the advantages they bring to the client and the service provider, such as ease of use, the fight against fraud, increased transaction speed, increased reliability of terminals and cards and reduced maintenance costs. Moreover, an interoperable electronic ticketing system offers the public greater freedom and seamless journeys, and opens the door to collaboration with other urban actors, service providers and banks. In general, implementing an electronic ticketing system presents a real opportunity to give fresh impetus to a new service and customer relations.

In the spring of 1995, a group of pioneers in the use of contactless technologies for fare collection saw a need for a forum to promote the sharing of information and experience between transit operators. This group of transit leaders from Venice, Lisbon, Paris, and the Bodensee Region of Germany formed the Contactless User Board or CLUB as a not-for-profit association. The mission of CLUB is “to foster worldwide the adoption of Contactless Smartcard Systems, to provide an information exchange platform for members about contactless smart card technology, and to offer various views, feedbacks and visits to concrete installations.”

ASK is playing both sides of the street, so to speak—high end and low end—and it’s paying off big time. With its paper, disposable (but reusable) contactless cards on one side, and its contact/contactless multi-application cards on the other, the company exceeded $20 million in revenue in just its fifth year of operation.

More than 80,000 cards have been issued since the University of Waterloo (UW) initiated its WatCard program in 1993. Since then, a string of successful system additions–including the current rollout of the card within the public transportation system–has kept the system at the forefront of campus card technology in Canada and beyond. UW is located in the heart of southwestern Ontario, an hour west of Toronto and an hour and a half northwest of Niagara Falls. Founded in 1957, it has more than 20,000 undergraduate students, 2,000 graduate students, and 1,700 faculty and staff.

To say that the fare collection system in Hong Kong has been well received would certainly be an understatement. Today, there are actually more Octopus Cards in circulation than there are residents in Hong Kong. Nearly 9 million of the contactless fare collection cards have been issued since the program began in 1997, making it among the largest and the oldest contactless fare collection systems in the world. Cardholders move between ferry, bus, light rail, heavy rail and underground services–provided by nearly 100 different service providers–with the help of the same contactless card.

BY KIMBERLY BRENNER
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Atlanta Georgia, known for the Braves, Coca-Cola, and CNN, is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. It is also home to the ninth largest transit system in the U.S. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) provides bus, rail, and paratransit service for 550,000 residents and visitors each day. According to the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), the primary cause of Atlanta’s growth is its strategic location in the air, rail and highway networks of the southeastern United States. It is vital that these transportation networks keep the pace with the latest technology. To this end, MARTA has plans to convert the current token and magnetic stripe-based fare collection systems into a contactless card-based system.

The Island of Capri is located just south of Naples on Italy’s beautiful Amalfi Coast. The island is only 6.7 km (4 miles) long and 2.7 km (1.5 miles) wide and has fewer than 15,000 residents with residing primarily in the two main towns of Capri and Anacapri. But while it may be small in size and population, it is immense in history, beauty, and tourist appeal. Each year, 7 million visitors flock to Capri to enjoy its beaches, visit its historical sites, and explore its renowned Blue Grotto.

This month the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) selected ERG Transit Systems and Northrop Grumman IT to install and operate a new Regional Customer Service Center for its smart card-based fare collection system, known as SmarTrip.

Washington D.C.’s SmarTrip® contactless fare collection project is interesting for a lot of reasons. It is large and extremely successful. It is expanding regionally. It is advancing much of its initial technology. And it has positioned two companies as project partners that more often find themselves as competitors.

With many transit systems in the process of updating their aging automatic fare collection systems and these same entities investigating or moving towards contactless technology, a new white paper from the Smart Card Alliance investigates the potential for fare collection cards to be utilized for additional payment functions outside the transit arena.

Washington, D.C. made history when it became the first U.S. city to deploy a contactless smart card system- wide for mass transit. The Smar- Trip® card has gained widespread acceptance in the Washington, D.C. area, particularly in the past year. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has more than 300,000 SmarTrip® customers and adds an average of 3,000 new customers each week.

During the Contactless Technology in Transportation session at CARTES, Nicole Carrol of EDS announced that London’s contactless ticketing project was officially launched. The much-anticipated name for the card is the “Oyster.” According to Ms. Carrol, the name has meaning because “the oyster protects a pearl in much the same way that the card protects the cardholder’s money.”