#transitcards — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #transitcards, aggregated by home.social.
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My growing retired-transit-card collection
A year ago, this week’s work trip to the Bay Area would have meant breaking out the oldest computer that I was still using with any regularity at the time: the Clipper card that I bought in June of 2012 to pay for fares on BART, Muni and other transit agencies around San Francisco.
But this year, I could leave that NFC-enabled smart card in the little holder in which I store my other stored-value transit cards and instead tap my phone to pay with my business credit card for each ride–first a SamTrans bus from SFO to Millbrae, then Caltrain to San Jose for TechEx North America, then two days of commuting up and down the peninsula for Google I/O.
BART started accepting contactless payments last August, and now all the Bay Area transit services that accept Clipper cards also let you tap to pay with a phone, a smartwatch or a credit or debit card with an NFC chip.
Whether you call it “tap to pay,” “open payments” or “open loop,” letting people pay for a fare as if it were any other on-the-go purchase is a great advance for transit. Especially for out-of-towners, as I realized years ago when visiting Chicago and Portland and appreciating the early lead of their transit services in this key bit of CX.
A growing array of agencies across the U.S. have finally wised up to this after years of requiring people to buy proprietary stored-value cards, install agency-specific apps or make a throwback cash payment: Metro, NYC’s MTA, the T in Boston, NJ Transit buses and light rail, SEPTA around Philadelphia, MARTA in Atlanta, and the Seattle region’s Sound Transit, among many others.
L.A.’s Metro has been a high-profile laggard–a personally inconvenient one since my TAP card expired last year. But this week users have begun reporting success on Reddit and in Bluesky posts with using their phones and credit cards to cover train and bus fares now that Metro there seems to have begun a soft launch of what it calls “TAP Plus.”
As I’ve spent down the balance on transit cards I no longer need, the ones that I still need to use are now most entirely confined to agencies in other countries. Some examples: I love Barcelona’s Metro but I don’t love how it doesn’t support tap to pay; Doha’s driverless metro is a technological marvel but also requires its own colorful card; Vancouver’s Compass Card offers enough of a discount over tap-to-pay rates (because that city didn’t follow Toronto’s fare-neutral example) that I picked up one for last year’s Web Summit conference there and used it again for this year’s event.
But there is one awkward exception right in my neighborhood: Arlington Transit, which continues to require the SmarTrip card that WMATA rolled out in 1999. So while I can pay for Metro like it’s the 21st century, I still have to keep my well-worn SmarTrip card handy in case an ART bus rolls up before a Metro bus does.
#ApplePay #ArlingtonTransit #ARTBus #BART #Caltrain #CharlieCard #ClipperCard #GoogleWallet #MBTA #Metro #NFCPayments #openLoop #openPayments #SmarTrip #tapToPay #TheT #transit #transitApps #transitCards -
My growing retired-transit-card collection
A year ago, this week’s work trip to the Bay Area would have meant breaking out the oldest computer that I was still using with any regularity at the time: the Clipper card that I bought in June of 2012 to pay for fares on BART, Muni and other transit agencies around San Francisco.
But this year, I could leave that NFC-enabled smart card in the little holder in which I store my other stored-value transit cards and instead tap my phone to pay with my business credit card for each ride–first a SamTrans bus from SFO to Millbrae, then Caltrain to San Jose for TechEx North America, then two days of commuting up and down the peninsula for Google I/O.
BART started accepting contactless payments last August, and now all the Bay Area transit services that accept Clipper cards also let you tap to pay with a phone, a smartwatch or a credit or debit card with an NFC chip.
Whether you call it “tap to pay,” “open payments” or “open loop,” letting people pay for a fare as if it were any other on-the-go purchase is a great advance for transit. Especially for out-of-towners, as I realized years ago when visiting Chicago and Portland and appreciating the early lead of their transit services in this key bit of CX.
A growing array of agencies across the U.S. have finally wised up to this after years of requiring people to buy proprietary stored-value cards, install agency-specific apps or make a throwback cash payment: Metro, NYC’s MTA, the T in Boston, NJ Transit buses and light rail, SEPTA around Philadelphia, MARTA in Atlanta, and the Seattle region’s Sound Transit, among many others.
L.A.’s Metro has been a high-profile laggard–a personally inconvenient one since my TAP card expired last year. But this week users have begun reporting success on Reddit and in Bluesky posts with using their phones and credit cards to cover train and bus fares now that Metro there seems to have begun a soft launch of what it calls “TAP Plus.”
As I’ve spent down the balance on transit cards I no longer need, the ones that I still need to use are now most entirely confined to agencies in other countries. Some examples: I love Barcelona’s Metro but I don’t love how it doesn’t support tap to pay; Doha’s driverless metro is a technological marvel but also requires its own colorful card; Vancouver’s Compass Card offers enough of a discount over tap-to-pay rates (because that city didn’t follow Toronto’s fare-neutral example) that I picked up one for last year’s Web Summit conference there and used it again for this year’s event.
But there is one awkward exception right in my neighborhood: Arlington Transit, which continues to require the SmarTrip card that WMATA rolled out in 1999. So while I can pay for Metro like it’s the 21st century, I still have to keep my well-worn SmarTrip card handy in case an ART bus rolls up before a Metro bus does.
#ApplePay #ArlingtonTransit #ARTBus #BART #Caltrain #CharlieCard #ClipperCard #GoogleWallet #MBTA #Metro #NFCPayments #openLoop #openPayments #SmarTrip #tapToPay #TheT #transit #transitApps #transitCards -
My growing retired-transit-card collection
A year ago, this week’s work trip to the Bay Area would have meant breaking out the oldest computer that I was still using with any regularity at the time: the Clipper card that I bought in June of 2012 to pay for fares on BART, Muni and other transit agencies around San Francisco.
But this year, I could leave that NFC-enabled smart card in the little holder in which I store my other stored-value transit cards and instead tap my phone to pay with my business credit card for each ride–first a SamTrans bus from SFO to Millbrae, then Caltrain to San Jose for TechEx North America, then two days of commuting up and down the peninsula for Google I/O.
BART started accepting contactless payments last August, and now all the Bay Area transit services that accept Clipper cards also let you tap to pay with a phone, a smartwatch or a credit or debit card with an NFC chip.
Whether you call it “tap to pay,” “open payments” or “open loop,” letting people pay for a fare as if it were any other on-the-go purchase is a great advance for transit. Especially for out-of-towners, as I realized years ago when visiting Chicago and Portland and appreciating the early lead of their transit services in this key bit of CX.
A growing array of agencies across the U.S. have finally wised up to this after years of requiring people to buy proprietary stored-value cards, install agency-specific apps or make a throwback cash payment: Metro, NYC’s MTA, the T in Boston, NJ Transit buses and light rail, SEPTA around Philadelphia, MARTA in Atlanta, and the Seattle region’s Sound Transit, among many others.
L.A.’s Metro has been a high-profile laggard–a personally inconvenient one since my TAP card expired last year. But this week users have begun reporting success on Reddit and in Bluesky posts with using their phones and credit cards to cover train and bus fares now that Metro there seems to have begun a soft launch of what it calls “TAP Plus.”
As I’ve spent down the balance on transit cards I no longer need, the ones that I still need to use are now most entirely confined to agencies in other countries. Some examples: I love Barcelona’s Metro but I don’t love how it doesn’t support tap to pay; Doha’s driverless metro is a technological marvel but also requires its own colorful card; Vancouver’s Compass Card offers enough of a discount over tap-to-pay rates (because that city didn’t follow Toronto’s fare-neutral example) that I picked up one for last year’s Web Summit conference there and used it again for this year’s event.
But there is one awkward exception right in my neighborhood: Arlington Transit, which continues to require the SmarTrip card that WMATA rolled out in 1999. So while I can pay for Metro like it’s the 21st century, I still have to keep my well-worn SmarTrip card handy in case an ART bus rolls up before a Metro bus does.
#ApplePay #ArlingtonTransit #ARTBus #BART #Caltrain #CharlieCard #ClipperCard #GoogleWallet #MBTA #Metro #NFCPayments #openLoop #openPayments #SmarTrip #tapToPay #TheT #transit #transitApps #transitCards -
My growing retired-transit-card collection
A year ago, this week’s work trip to the Bay Area would have meant breaking out the oldest computer that I was still using with any regularity at the time: the Clipper card that I bought in June of 2012 to pay for fares on BART, Muni and other transit agencies around San Francisco.
But this year, I could leave that NFC-enabled smart card in the little holder in which I store my other stored-value transit cards and instead tap my phone to pay with my business credit card for each ride–first a SamTrans bus from SFO to Millbrae, then Caltrain to San Jose for TechEx North America, then two days of commuting up and down the peninsula for Google I/O.
BART started accepting contactless payments last August, and now all the Bay Area transit services that accept Clipper cards also let you tap to pay with a phone, a smartwatch or a credit or debit card with an NFC chip.
Whether you call it “tap to pay,” “open payments” or “open loop,” letting people pay for a fare as if it were any other on-the-go purchase is a great advance for transit. Especially for out-of-towners, as I realized years ago when visiting Chicago and Portland and appreciating the early lead of their transit services in this key bit of CX.
A growing array of agencies across the U.S. have finally wised up to this after years of requiring people to buy proprietary stored-value cards, install agency-specific apps or make a throwback cash payment: Metro, NYC’s MTA, the T in Boston, NJ Transit buses and light rail, SEPTA around Philadelphia, MARTA in Atlanta, and the Seattle region’s Sound Transit, among many others.
L.A.’s Metro has been a high-profile laggard–a personally inconvenient one since my TAP card expired last year. But this week users have begun reporting success on Reddit and in Bluesky posts with using their phones and credit cards to cover train and bus fares now that Metro there seems to have begun a soft launch of what it calls “TAP Plus.”
As I’ve spent down the balance on transit cards I no longer need, the ones that I still need to use are now most entirely confined to agencies in other countries. Some examples: I love Barcelona’s Metro but I don’t love how it doesn’t support tap to pay; Doha’s driverless metro is a technological marvel but also requires its own colorful card; Vancouver’s Compass Card offers enough of a discount over tap-to-pay rates (because that city didn’t follow Toronto’s fare-neutral example) that I picked up one for last year’s Web Summit conference there and used it again for this year’s event.
But there is one awkward exception right in my neighborhood: Arlington Transit, which continues to require the SmarTrip card that WMATA rolled out in 1999. So while I can pay for Metro like it’s the 21st century, I still have to keep my well-worn SmarTrip card handy in case an ART bus rolls up before a Metro bus does.
#ApplePay #ArlingtonTransit #ARTBus #BART #Caltrain #CharlieCard #ClipperCard #GoogleWallet #MBTA #Metro #NFCPayments #openLoop #openPayments #SmarTrip #tapToPay #TheT #transit #transitApps #transitCards -
ANAHEIM, Calif.
The past two weeks of travel have involved different modes of transportation that separately surfaced the same defect on the screen of my aging phone: no support for the default payment system already enabled on the device.
Think of this as a two-hands problem: When a transit app doesn’t let you select Google Wallet or Apple Pay to pay for a ride, most people will have to fish a credit card out of a wallet or purse and hold it in one hand while thumb-typing the card’s digits into the app with the other. That’s not a great customer experience while sitting at a train station or bus stop, considerably worse when standing in a moving train or bus.
(I work around that by using 1Password to fill in saved credit-card info, but many people don’t use third-party password managers.)
The most recent offenders were Bike Share Toronto, which I used to get between two events at Collision two weeks ago, and Metrolink commuter rail in Los Angeles, which I used to get from L.A. to here Wednesday as part of a trip that’s combined getting some time in Waymo robotaxis with covering the VidCon conference here.
Those apps join a list of others that I’ve installed and seen exhibit the same shortfall: Las Vegas’s rideRTC, Boston’s mTicket, the Bay Area’s SMART, and Deutsche Bahn’s DB Navigator. Many of these apps credit the same app framework, Masabi’s Justride; a support note on that U.K. firm’s site mentions Apple Pay support but not Google Wallet, so maybe iPhone users don’t have this issue.
But these other apps on my phone show that paying for a fare on the go doesn’t have to take extra steps: Capital Bikeshare’s CaBi, Metro’s SmarTrip (which until a few months ago, was not in this category), Austin’s CapMetro, the Bay Area’s Clipper, for example.
I’d rather see transit agencies follow the examples of Chicago, New York and Portland by directly supporting tap-to-pay payments in stations and on buses so frequent travelers don’t have to collect transit apps the way infrastructure nerds like me collect transit smart cards. But that may involve a lot more work by transit agencies–and those unable to make that transition yet need to make it easier for customers to give them their money.
#BART #BikeShareToronto #bikeshare #CaBi #CapitalMetro #DBNavigator #Metro #Metrolink #NFC #SMART #SmarTrip #transitCards #transitFare #UX #WMATA
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ANAHEIM, Calif.
The past two weeks of travel have involved different modes of transportation that separately surfaced the same defect on the screen of my aging phone: no support for the default payment system already enabled on the device.
Think of this as a two-hands problem: When a transit app doesn’t let you select Google Wallet or Apple Pay to pay for a ride, most people will have to fish a credit card out of a wallet or purse and hold it in one hand while thumb-typing the card’s digits into the app with the other. That’s not a great customer experience while sitting at a train station or bus stop, considerably worse when standing in a moving train or bus.
(I work around that by using 1Password to fill in saved credit-card info, but many people don’t use third-party password managers.)
The most recent offenders were Bike Share Toronto, which I used to get between two events at Collision two weeks ago, and Metrolink commuter rail in Los Angeles, which I used to get from L.A. to here Wednesday as part of a trip that’s combined getting some time in Waymo robotaxis with covering the VidCon conference here.
Those apps join a list of others that I’ve installed and seen exhibit the same shortfall: Las Vegas’s rideRTC, Boston’s mTicket, the Bay Area’s SMART, and Deutsche Bahn’s DB Navigator. Many of these apps credit the same app framework, Masabi’s Justride; a support note on that U.K. firm’s site mentions Apple Pay support but not Google Wallet, so maybe iPhone users don’t have this issue.
But these other apps on my phone show that paying for a fare on the go doesn’t have to take extra steps: Capital Bikeshare’s CaBi, Metro’s SmarTrip (which until a few months ago, was not in this category), Austin’s CapMetro, the Bay Area’s Clipper, for example.
I’d rather see transit agencies follow the examples of Chicago, New York and Portland by directly supporting tap-to-pay payments in stations and on buses so frequent travelers don’t have to collect transit apps the way infrastructure nerds like me collect transit smart cards. But that may involve a lot more work by transit agencies–and those unable to make that transition yet need to make it easier for customers to give them their money.
#BART #BikeShareToronto #bikeshare #CaBi #CapitalMetro #DBNavigator #Metro #Metrolink #NFC #SMART #SmarTrip #transitCards #transitFare #UX #WMATA
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ANAHEIM, Calif.
The past two weeks of travel have involved different modes of transportation that separately surfaced the same defect on the screen of my aging phone: no support for the default payment system already enabled on the device.
Think of this as a two-hands problem: When a transit app doesn’t let you select Google Wallet or Apple Pay to pay for a ride, most people will have to fish a credit card out of a wallet or purse and hold it in one hand while thumb-typing the card’s digits into the app with the other. That’s not a great customer experience while sitting at a train station or bus stop, considerably worse when standing in a moving train or bus.
(I work around that by using 1Password to fill in saved credit-card info, but many people don’t use third-party password managers.)
The most recent offenders were Bike Share Toronto, which I used to get between two events at Collision two weeks ago, and Metrolink commuter rail in Los Angeles, which I used to get from L.A. to here Wednesday as part of a trip that’s combined getting some time in Waymo robotaxis with covering the VidCon conference here.
Those apps join a list of others that I’ve installed and seen exhibit the same shortfall: Las Vegas’s rideRTC, Boston’s mTicket, the Bay Area’s SMART, and Deutsche Bahn’s DB Navigator. Many of these apps credit the same app framework, Masabi’s Justride; a support note on that U.K. firm’s site mentions Apple Pay support but not Google Wallet, so maybe iPhone users don’t have this issue.
But these other apps on my phone show that paying for a fare on the go doesn’t have to take extra steps: Capital Bikeshare’s CaBi, Metro’s SmarTrip (which until a few months ago, was not in this category), Austin’s CapMetro, the Bay Area’s Clipper, for example.
I’d rather see transit agencies follow the examples of Chicago, New York and Portland by directly supporting tap-to-pay payments in stations and on buses so frequent travelers don’t have to collect transit apps the way infrastructure nerds like me collect transit smart cards. But that may involve a lot more work by transit agencies–and those unable to make that transition yet need to make it easier for customers to give them their money.
#BART #BikeShareToronto #bikeshare #CaBi #CapitalMetro #DBNavigator #Metro #Metrolink #NFC #SMART #SmarTrip #transitCards #transitFare #UX #WMATA