Glad to see that they are not doing away with cash payment. The QR code system has been a pain in the bottom.
CapMetro bringing tap-to-pay to Austin’s buses and trains by March - Austin MonitorAustin Monitor
#Austin #CapMetro #Bus #Transit #TapToPay #PublicTransport #Texas #FarePayment #CapitalMetro
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
