ACS takes Mexico City’s transit system contactless
05 February, 2007
category: Contactless, Transit
ACS is upgrading the ticketing and fare collection system in Mexico City to include contactless technology. With four million daily commuters, Mexico City’s public transportation system is a massive program and the ACS solution is a massive undertaking – equipping every metro station and 2000 access gates by November of this year.
With ACS, Mexico City metro adopts contactless ticketing in record time while keeping its existing equipment
The Mexico City metro operator (Sistema de Transporte Colectivo – STC) has just decided to make contactless ticketing a standard feature. Between now and November 2007, ACS will extend this technology across the entire network, equip the 2 000 platform access gates with contactless card readers and deploy manual and automatic ticket sales points. ACS will also equip each metro station with a supervision system and data concentrator, as well as an optical fibre intelligent communication network linking all the equipment.
This follows on from a pilot experiment conducted from late 2005 to early 2006. During these tests, ACS proved that it was capable of deploying contactless e-ticketing within a short time on disparate magnetic equipment, some of which was more than 30 years old.
This pilot scheme was thus able to validate the relevance of the selected technologies and their seamless co-existence with magnetic stripe ticketing.
Right from the start, the ACS system enabled STC to use cards based on either A or B technologies, whereby the operator was able to offer different types of cards for different categories of user: free cards for entitled passengers and prepaid cards, by a simple parameter definition.
ACS is the first and only operator to use this dual technology on a single system.
Lasting performance
In order to upgrade five generations of equipment, some of which commissioned as far back as 1968, ACS needed all its archived technical literature and relied on its long-service employees, some of whom were involved in deploying the very earliest equipment.
The operator was reassured by ACS’s ability to integrate new technologies with old equipment and obtain a reliable result. “Right from the word go there was no room for mistakes. If we were to persuade our four million daily users to adopt a modernised system, we first had to prove that it would be efficient,” explained Florencia Serrania, former manager of STC who instigated the Mexico City metro contactless ticketing project before handing it over to Fransisco Bojorquez, the current General Manager.
The Mexican capital thus joins Lyons, Toulouse, Montreal and Marseilles on the list of major cities which have recently called on ACS to deploy their contactless ticketing systems.
About Affiliated Computer Services, Inc.(ACS)
ACS (Affiliated Computer Services, Inc.), a global FORTUNE 500 company headquartered in Dallas, Texas with more than 55,000 people supporting operations in nearly 100 countries, provides business process outsourcing and information technology solutions to world-class commercial and government clients. The company’s Class A common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “ACS”.