Open-Fare Payments in US Transportation
- In the US, transportation operators are thriving towards contactless solutions and praise open standards. Several players even deem that proprietary cards are now obsolete even if these transportation fairs, set up in the 90s, take time to be replaced.
- Many large US towns have gone contactless, including Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas and New Jersey. In New York City tests have been conducted without leading to mass adoption, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority explains it is now getting ready for a large scale deployment phased over three years.
- Through adopting an open standard card issuance and management would be transferred to banks and processors releasing agencies from administrative efforts and saving them money.
- In the US, transportation operators seem to be heading towards adopting contactless transportation cards. Nevertheless, experiments conducted in Utah by ISIS (to be launched in 2012) and in New Jersey by NJ Transit with Google Wallet seem to indicate they are also considering mobile solutions.
- These moves are also highlighted by the large number of pilot tests on the international level to pinpoint the financial issues at stake further stressed by the Smart Card Alliance (SCA). The SCA reminds Gartner’s figures anticipating the growth of compatible mobile devices to over 100 million in 2012.
- This month, the Alliance has released a White Paper focusing on contactless solutions in the transportation industry (Near Field Communication (NFC) and Transit: Applications, Technology and Implementation Considerations) and insists on the need to capitalise on the popularity of mobile media to create use cases and profit (payments, couponing, promotions, ticketing, etc.). Several manufacturers, carriers, card networks (Visa, American Express, MasterCard Worldwide), transportation companies and banks have contributed to its development.