To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
By and large, the way Americans book and pay for city transportation has worked the same way for decades.
The process of buying a physical ticket to access public
transit comes to us from a distinctly pre-digital era, yet it remains
ubiquitous across the country. In an era of globalizing forces, city
transportation systems have maintained their local color and variety.
That creates complications when passengers want to switch from, say, a
taxi to a bus to a light rail train and need different forms of payment
for each. Or when somebody travels to a different city and needs to buy a
whole new roster of ticketing options to do the exact same thing
.
At the same time, many of the world’s great cities have charged ahead with modern updates to the way people travel. Japan’s Pasmo pass
lets users hop on trains, the metro, buses, and taxis, and even go
shopping with a single rechargeable card. Hong Kong’s eerily ubiquitous Octopus card
covers all sorts of public transit options—trams, buses, ferries,
trains—not to mention parking meters, shops, swimming pools, and
“Chinese-style wet markets.” The Dutch OV-chipkaart covers all public
transit nationwide. These technologies harness the power of RFID
technology to speed up payments.
There are also opportunities to use those tiny computers so many people now carry around as phones.
American researchers, nonprofits, and high-tech startups are currently
pushing for digitally integrated transit systems for a more streamlined
passenger experience, with promises of cost savings for both riders and
operators, and other quality of life improvements. These early adopters
have yanked the vision of universal fare cards and seamless urban
transit out of the pages of science fiction and pulled it into our
world.
Information superhighways
For city travelers to efficiently navigate the many transit
options available to them, they need timely and accurate intel. Joseph
Kopser founded a company on the idea that more informed passengers will
spur a more effective transit system.
Kopser’s Austin-based start-up, RideScout, gives users access to the full range of options
available to them for getting from point A to point B. Maybe the subway
looks optimal, but you’d get there faster taking a bus you’ve never
heard of and switching to another one at an intersection you don’t
recognize. The app shows all the options and lets the user decide.
Systems such as this have grown in recent years. Google Maps and HopStop
plot out your route through multiple modes of public transit. RideScout
includes a fuller range of car-share, bike-share, taxi, and parking
options, but Kopser is aiming for something bigger: a full accounting of
travel’s costs.
RideScout shows users the full range of transit options available to them in a city. (RideScout)
It’s
hard for people to plan the way they move through a city because there
are many possible values to prioritize and lots of shadow costs, he
says. If you go by the cost of gas versus a bus ticket, your drive might
look cheaper. But what if you factor in the value of your time spent
driving when you could be doing other productive things? A smart app can
step in to keep track of those different values and help you calculate.
“Some days cost is going to be more important, some days
time is going to be more important, some days reliability is going to be
more important,” Kopser says. “If we’re keeping track of all those
expenses for you, then you’ve got a scenario where you’re able to see
the real costs and then you can make more informed decisions.”
One payment to rule them all
The real savings will come from integrating this type of real-time transit data with a unified payment mechanism
for all the various transit systems. This will save time and stress for
riders (no fumbling for change to refill a fare card before the train
or bus pulls out of the station), eliminate redundant payments for each
mode of transportation, and generate a lot of useful data for transit
agencies.
An early attempt at universal fare cards happened in
Chicago back in 2009. Sharon Feigon ran a nonprofit car-share program
there called I-Go, and she wanted her members to access the vehicles
with the same fare card they used for Chicago public transit. The
challenges she faced indicate just how hard this shift is to make.
“I always wanted to have this integrated fare card because
it just made so much sense: you combine all the modes together,” says
Feigon, who now directs the Shared-Use Mobility Center, a group pushing
for accessible transit alternatives to car ownership.
Feigon got the Chicago Transit Authority onboard with the
idea, but it turned out I-Go cards used a different frequency than the
Chicago cards, so the two systems had no way to communicate with each
other. Each system was designed by a different software provider in
Germany using proprietary technology, and those companies were going to
charge an overwhelming price to merge them. I-Go settled on a much
simpler hack: CTA riders who signed up for the car-share would get an
RFID sticker slapped on the side of their Chicago Card, and the sticker
would communicate with the car-share readers.
The passengers saw benefits in ease of access to different
modes of transit. It made it easier to pop off a subway and hop in a
car-share without having to plan everything out ahead of time. But the
obstacles Feigon ran into make it unlikely that future efforts will go
the route of physically merging discrete fare systems.
We may not have to. Smartphones can act as secure ticketing devices, as shown by Portland, Oregon-based GlobeSherpa,
which operates just such a service in 11 American cities. The app lets
you book and pay for your whole trip across different types of transit
in one place. They launched the TriMet Tickets app in Portland nearly
two years ago, and it now has 170,00 registered users and processes more
than $1.5 million in ticket sales per month.
GlobeSherpa lets you buy transit tickets through your phone and generates a verifiable digital ticket. (GlobeSherpa)
“We’re
really removing the archaic processes and tools used in the previous
century to administer complex business, and we’re bringing it to
mobile,” CEO Nat Parker says.
Unified mobile ticketing means riders no longer need to
worry about having the right change for the bus, or having time to buy a
train ticket at the station after hitting a major traffic jam. And
there’s seamless transitioning between modes of transit. But the
digitization creates a lot of savings for the transit agencies
themselves.
The purveyors of public transit won’t need to spend as much money
purchasing and installing collection machines, or hiring armored cars
to collect the coin and cash deposited therein. Parker says the mobile
approach even makes things easier for the ticket inspectors who make the
rounds on trains. The current standard protocol for issuing citations
to passengers who didn’t buy the proper ticket involves filling out a
triplicate paper form by hand on a clipboard, and tearing off a slip for
the rider. Now the officer can scan the mobile ticket and, if need be,
quickly fill out the citation form digitally and print it on a portable
Bluetooth-tethered printer.
Then there’s the data. When transit operators have a
massive live stream of data on how many people are buying tickets, where
they are, where they’re headed, it allows for much more responsive
management. They can tweak bus routes based on how the customers
actually buy bus tickets and ride. Granted, this approach can’t truly
transform American cities until everyone has access to the critical
technology.
“The challenge is while so many people do have smartphones,
not everyone has smartphones,” Feigon says. “You’re going to get
different communities that are not going to have the same thing.”
Working out the kinks
RideScout acquired GlobeSherpa this summer and is working
on merging their products. That will bring the mobile ticketing to more
cities; RideScout operates in 69 cities currently. But the
proof-of-concept does not mean the rollout will be fast or easy.
Variations in ticketing technologies across transit modes and across
cities makes for a lot of work, and it takes time to get governments to
come around to these things.
That’s
perhaps why unified payment for city travel hasn’t already had the
Internet-age makeover that longer-form travel has enjoyed with the likes
of Kayak and Orbitz. For a flight across the country or overseas,
customers now expect a one-stop shop for comparing prices, with the
ability to book not just the flight but a rental car and hotel room,
too.
“The fares are relatively low [for urban transit], so the
cost of figuring out all this integration seems high compared to the
cost per trip,” Feigon says. “But when you put it all together there are
a lot of efficiencies.”
Then there is the question of political will. System-wide
overhauls of ticketing infrastructure cost a lot of money. GlobeSherpa
managed to circumvent that by easing in around the existing system, and
offering the operators useful new tools for letting them set up shop.
That lets the city try something new with very low overhead, and if it
works they can scale it up later.
That localized approach to transportation refurbishment may be the best bet, given the current Congress’s
record of absenteeism when it comes to infrastructure investment. But
if there are ears willing to listen, Feigon has some economic arguments
for universal fare cards: “To the extent that Congress is interested in
efficiency and economic development, making our transportation system
work really well is a good idea.”
Are you still driving to work? Your car may appear as the most
convenient method of commute, but perhaps you haven’t fully realized the
cost of your trips.
The Commute Cost Calculator, produced by Metro’s Rideshare
program, estimates just how much cash your engine is burning. Play with
the dials, see how the numbers change, add up your commute cost and
reassess your decisions.
Consider replacing some trips by connecting with Metro. You could
save money, time, and stop gritting your teeth at the endless sea of
brake lights.
