- Does it increase ridership and revenue?
- Does it improve customer satisfaction?
- Does it decrease costs?
These are the three questions Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) used to weigh the merits of implementing a new fare payment system. In 2011 DART developed a Concept of Operations (ConOps) document that examined its infrastructure, with special attention to the fare payment system. The ConOps provided a thorough look at all of the options in front of them and provided positive insight into contactless smart card-based solutions. However, after examining price quotes for implementing contactless smart cards or credit/debit cards, they decided, for the time being, to examine other options. In mobile ticketing, they found a solution that answered "Yes" to all of the questions, and provided other benefits as well.
Benefits of Mobile Ticketing
Smartphone adoption was rising quickly among all demographics of DART’s customer base. In analyzing mobile ticketing, they found it provides four benefits: reduced capital costs, flexibility for the future, new payment options for customers and an increase in the value proposition for customers.
Mobile ticketing helps reduce capital costs for DART by shifting the hardware expense to the customers. What customers call smartphones, we renamed “Pocket Vending Machines,” which reduce DART’s need and expense for ticket vending machines.
Mobile technology is changing rapidly, with new phones out on the market every six months, and near-field communications (NFC), a form of contactless communication, is just now arriving in late 2014. DART’s mobile ticketing app, GoPass, allows flexibility in how tickets can be validated. Currently, GoPass tickets use animated design elements and interactivity as security elements for visual validation. Once NFC gains broader acceptance in the marketplace, the app will use the NFC technology in customers’ phones for additional security. In the meantime many corporations, like Starbucks, are using bar code technology as a secure method to validate payments. DART is also using that technology with the mobile devices that its fare enforcement officers carry.
Additionally, mobile ticketing provides DART flexibility in the types of payments it can accept. Besides the major bank cards, in the future DART will be able to accept payment via Pay Pal or any other account-based system that allows real-time validation. The North Texas Tollway Association (NTTA) is developing such a system, and they are looking at partnering with DART in 2015.
Finally, mobile ticketing allows DART several ways to offer a new value proposition to its customers. It is important for us to make transit easier from the very first touch point customers have with our system. Since customers have to plan ahead to use transit in Dallas, the app includes a trip planner, rider alerts for service disruptions and the ability to view estimated times of arrival for buses and trains. Additionally, trip planner results include information about the type of ticket required for the journey and a link to the ticket purchase screen so customers can buy their ticket ahead of time. The ability to buy a ticket before arriving at the train station or bus stop was one of the features that customers commented about frequently. Not having to pull out their credit card or cash at a rail station makes people feel safer.
Testing, Launch and Rollout
The project manager for DART, Lawrence Sutton, was the agency face to Unwire, the Danish company that developed the app, and was responsible for, “making sure it (GoPass) works.” To help ensure that it would work, Sutton insisted that the project schedule incorporated adequate time for testing, including both a functional test and a four-week beta test. For the beta test, a small number of customers was selected as beta testers and a private Facebook group was established to allow them to communicate with each other. The testers took ownership of the app and after the launch, many comments in the app stores and on social media began with “I was a tester for the app …” The DART Marketing Department developed a full advertising campaign with the theme “Paper is so yesterday.” The Revenue team within Finance briefed and trained customer service personnel, bus operators and fare enforcement officers, all of whom became an enthusiastic sales force for the new mobile ticketing product.
GoPass was launched on September 16, 2013. It was fully deployed to the entire customer base without a pilot beyond the beta test group and also incorporated ticketing products of two other agencies, the Ft. Worth Transportation Authority and the Denton County Transportation Authority. Within the first sixty days, the app was downloaded 60,000 times from the Apple App and Google Play stores. We decided to measure the success of the app based on the number of downloads, because some customers will need to develop trust in the app before they make purchases. My priority was to get the app installed on customers’ phones, knowing that the ticket purchases would follow. By the one year anniversary of the lauch of GoPass there have been over 200,000 downloads of the app, far exceeding our internal estimates of 50,000!
DART offered tickets up to 31 days in duration for adults, children and seniors. While students have a high percentage of smartphone penetration, they are also high on the list of security concerns, so DART will add special tickets for them later.
In January 2014, DART offered mobile tickets for its prepaid corporate and student passes. These are passes paid for by a corporation or university and were previously distributed via stickers on IDs or a printed DART pass. This old method was very labor intensive, so administrators for these programs quickly became some of GoPass’ biggest advocates.
Special Events
Another important mobile ticketing aspect to explore was special event ticketing and the opportunity to bundle the event and transit tickets together. In April 2014, North Texas hosted the NCAA Final Four, for which DART offered special transit tickets on its mobile app. Customers could click on a link in the NCAA website and go directly to the GoPass app or website. More than 85 percent of all shuttle tickets for this event were sold and delivered through GoPass. This statistic demonstrates that even visitors will download and use a transit mobile app, as well as the importance of having a good link with the promoter (both figuratively and literally).
DART is offering a single ticket on GoPass that serves as the customer’s transit ticket and event ticket. In July 2014, they tested this approach by offering customers transit tickets and tickets to the Dallas Zoo in the GoPass app. In September 2014 DART introduced general admission tickets to the Texas State Fair, the annual attendance of which is more than 2.5 million visitors. Obviously, this method will be easier for general admission events like museums or parks; however, there is the potential to apply it to assigned seating events as well.
The benefits of offering special event tickets in GoPass are many. First, getting new riders who do not commute via DART brings new customers to the transit agency. Second, putting information about these special event tickets in the app means that commuters learn new ways to use transit. Lastly, our adult customer gets to see DART light rail through the eyes of his or her child — as an adventure — instead of just a way to get to work every day.
Several transit agencies have launched mobile ticketing apps and all have had very positive feedback from their customers, offering strong evidence that the public is ready and eager to pay for transit products via mobile devices. Mobile ticketing offers many advantages for transit agencies and can be readily deployed on a system-wide basis at a relatively low cost. It is highly adaptable and permits and encourages innovation in transit product offerings. Mobile ticketing currently provides a “cool factor” that demonstrates the transit agency is staying abreast of changing technologies and is keeping up with the new and younger transit customers who virtually live on their mobile devices. This truly is a payment method that does increase revenue, reduce costs, increase ridership and increase customer satisfaction.
David Leininger is the executive vice president at DART and Lawrence Sutton is project manager for transit and rail technology for CH2M Hill.
