A minor revolution will take place on 1 September this year, when customers of the Société des Transports de Lévis swap their paper tickets for interoperable contactless cards. The operator, which manages 110 urban buses in the town situated opposite Quebec City, will become the sixth transport company to enter the unified travel area created since 2008 thanks to the Opus card, which has already been enthusiastically adopted by the residents of Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, Quebec and the Laurentians (see our article and our case study). The contactless ticket is all the more eagerly awaited as many of Lévis’ 140,000 inhabitants already use it for travelling in the nearby capital city! "Nearly 40% of our customers go to Quebec each day," reckons Jean-François Carrier, who made the introduction of Opus one of his priorities when he took over as managing director of ST Lévis two years ago.

Ahead of schedule
No wonder that contacting ACS was the natural thing to do: "In view of their successful experience with the other operators, we decided to get them to deploy our new ticketing system without even calling for tenders." And their confidence paid off. The system is currently being deployed in the buses and with the network’s 35 retailers (grocery stores and chemists)… two months ahead of the original schedule! And there have been no hitches – yet another illustration of the capacity of the Atlas^® modular central system to integrate new operators quickly. In addition, the financial conditions have been optimised by pooling the various transport companies’ data processing facilities.