The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority is close to awarding a contract for its open-loop contactless fare collection system.
ACS Transport Solutions Group, Cubic Transportation Systems Inc. and Scheidt & Bachmann are still in the running for the contract and the authority expects to make a decision either this month or next, a spokesperson confirms to PaymentsSource.
“It is anticipated that it will take two to three years to implement the new system,” the spokesperson says.
The authority expects to spend $100 million replacing old transit-entry turnstiles with ones that contain a contactless reader. Once installed, some 3.9 million commuters in the Philadelphia area will be able to use contactless credit and debit card in addition to the authority’s closed-loop fare card to pay fares on the system. Near Field Communication technology-enabled mobile phones also could be used to pay fares, the authority says.
The authority’s rail system will require commuters to tap their cards when they enter a turnstile and again when leaving the station to determine the right fare, according to a report from the Philadelphia Inquirer. The agency might need to redraw the system’s payment zones as a result.
Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Princeton Junction, N.J.-based Smart Card Alliance, expects contactless card issuers to greatly benefit from the Philadelphia area’s new system.
“Imagine the delight for financial institutions in seeing their contactless cards being used in a growing percentage of the more than 1 million SEPTA rider transactions per day,” Vanderhoof says. “That is more than the number of transactions some issuers see in a year from their customers today.”
Camden, N.J.-based Port Authority Transit Corp. also stands to benefit from Philadelphia’s decision to add open-loop contactless payments.
That agency is partnering with Cubic in a 12-month pilot enabling commuters to pay both transit fares and retail purchases using a Visa-branded contactless prepaid debit card (
Some 38,000 commuters use the Camden-based commuter-rail system daily, mostly for traveling to work in Philadelphia. Once there, commuters use the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority to travel within the city.
Kathleen Imperatore, director of fare collection operations for the Camden organization, believes it would greatly benefit commuters to use one card for two different systems.
“[Open-loop systems] are obviously the trend,” Imperatore told PaymentsSource last month. “We’re small, but we don’t want to be stuck doing something that other agencies aren’t doing.”
Vanderhoof notes his organization is near the end of a four-year period of transportation industry design and development work on open payments adoption. Much of that work centered on the alliance and its transportation council.
“The transit agencies have worked closely together and with the transit industry fare collection vendors and system integrators to transform their operating model and move away from proprietary closed-loop fare media,” he says.
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