United States
New steps forward for contactless bank cards
Pioneer of the Open Payment System in public transport, New York is moving into top gear with a "life-size" multimodal, multi-operator, multi-card test... bringing together all the components of a comprehensive program.
This summer, New York will step up its experiment with contactless bank card payment on public transport, on a much bigger scale than the first phase of tests launched four years ago, involving 15,000 passengers using MasterCard® at 30 subway stations. This time, 1.5 million daily users will be able to pay in this way. "We have reached the scale of a major city network," confirms Mike Nash, Vice President, Transportation Solutions at ACS.
Three operators
Indeed: several operators will be participating in this next stage. Firstly, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), a pioneer with contactless payments on the Lexington line subway, is extending the experiment to several bus lines and fitting over two hundred of its vehicles with readers. Users will also be able to pay by contactless bank card to go to New Jersey, by taking one of the trains run by the Port Authority Trans Hudson (PATH), which has equipped its stations with the requisite readers, or the duly-fitted buses operated by NJ Transit on three of it’s bus routes.
The range of accepted cards is also expanding. Readers both at stations and on board vehicles will be MasterCard® PayPass™-enabled, and also accept Visa payWave cards.
Real-time ticketing
Naturally, the back-office facilities must also be up to scratch. "When a user passes his bank card in front of a reader, it must check that he has a prepaid season ticket. If he does, his trip is validated. If he doesn’t, a bank transaction is triggered in order to bill him. All this in just half a second, to keep the service running smoothly," sums up Marc Gordon, Vice President responsible for developing ACS Public Transport in the US market.
ACS will be participating with a new system, Atlas On-Line, which combines two technologies: the state-of-the-art open, interoperable public transport ticketing system deployed on some of the world’s largest networks, and real-time payment, which has been tried and tested in the USA in a number of places with the EZ-Pass program which uses the ACS Vector platform – the underlying technology behind the real-time payment capability in Atlas On-Line.
The initial tests are highly promising, with a transaction initiated on board a bus taking between 0.3 and 0.6 second. "It’s a real challenge, because the data is encrypted, Mike Nash explains. We meet it by tapping into the widest bandwidths available in 3G telephony."
In addition, ACS has the expertise required to adapt Atlas On-Line to a variety of situations. "For instance, we can issue prepaid contactless cards to users who do not have bank cards, and the system can be used in parallel with magnetic or more traditional smart card ticketing," Mike Nash adds.
10% of all trips in the United States
Many eyes will thus be on New York this summer. "Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia... many large cities are weighing contactless bank card payment approaches to modernise their ticketing systems," Marc Gordon stresses. With this latest extension in New York, 10% of all public transport trips in the United States can be made in this way. And as half of all urban transport trips in the USA are made in the Big Apple, what better sample could we wish for?
.