Commuters on New York’s busy Metro-North Railroad won’t have to wait in line to buy train tickets if a mobile-ticketing test taking place this summer proves to be successful for the conductors who check thousands of tickets a day.
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority will work with mobile-ticketing provider Masabi US Ltd. to begin testing a smartphone application that will allow commuters to buy tickets from any location at any time through the end of the summer, the companies announced July 11.
During the test period, a few hundred users selected by the transit authority may download the free mTicketing application to Apple Inc. iPhones, Google Inc. Android handsets or Research in Motion Blackberry phones, according to a Masabi press release.
Commuters may purchase one-way, round-trip, daily, 10-trip or monthly passes from any origin or destination through the application, which links to a pre-enrolled credit or debit card, the release stated.
The time-and-date stamped electronic ticket shows up on the purchaser’s phone screen as a secure barcode image that the conductor validates with a handheld scanner or as a readable ticket with animated watermarks the conductor can validate by looking at it, says Masabi CEO Ben Whitaker.
“There is no customized equipment needed, and it is not a ticketing system at station gates or turnstiles,” Whitaker says. “It is the most reliable, low-tech system in that it relies on the conductor’s eyeballs.”
The Metro-North rail line represents an ideal system for mobile-ticket testing because it is “a big agency, and the conductors have to move through the rail cars quickly” to check all of the tickets or accept cash purchases for tickets, Whitaker says.
Masabi US Ltd., a unit of London-based Masabi, may expand its mobile ticketing system as other technologies, such as Near Field Communication, take hold and prove to be as fast and efficient as the company’s application-based mTicketing, Whitaker notes.
“Any technology that makes the commuter stop in a line for any longer than a half-second during rush hour will not work for a transit system,” Whitaker says. “We do not need to wait for NFC because even with the wind behind it, NFC transactions with mobile phones take longer than a half-second.”
The consumer experience, rather than technology, remains Masabi’s focus, Whitaker says. “If they can see their ticket on the phone screen and the bar code works, they think that is great,” he adds.
Still, the train conductors ultimately will determine whether the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority would make mTicketing available to all customers after the summer test run, Whitaker says.
“The transit agency will want to make sure the operational side works well and that it makes the conductors’ lives a little easier either by looking at the tickets or scanning them,” he adds.
Generally, consumer feedback to Masabi systems in the United Kingdom or other locations in the U.S., such as Boston, has been positive, Whitaker contends.
“The idea is to make buying a ticket easy and make it fast,” he says. “The phone remembers what the customer purchased before, so it is easy to get in the habit of buying tickets from your phone.”
Transportation agencies using the Masabi system often post signs near standard ticket counters, alerting customers that they don’t have to stand in line any more to purchase a ticket if they visit the agency website and download the mTicketing application, Whitaker notes.
“Some people standing in those lines can try to buy the ticket right there on their phone, and then just get out of that line when they see how easy it was,” he adds.
Masabi’s mTicketing system addresses the time-sensitive element of transportation ticketing that has plagued other systems, says Maria Arminio, president of Avenue B Consulting Inc., a Redondo Beach, Calif.-based payments management consulting firm.
“I remember when San Francisco tried to develop a contactless ticketing system for all levels of transportation in the city but could not get around the timing issues,” Arminio says.
A one-second delay in approving a ticket either by a reader or a transportation employee “is really problematic in that environment,” she adds.
Because the bar code is encrypted and the readable version of the ticket has color-changing watermarks, Masabi appears to have solid fraud-protection measures in place, Arminio suggests.
Still, getting all of the conductors to understand exactly what they will be looking for on the phone screens will be “an interesting task” for the transit authority, she suggests.
