The Future of Seamless Payment

In Denver, an app lets you scope walking distance between shifting bus schedules, tally the fastest path with or without light rail, and size up the carbon footprint of your journey. 

Paying for a multitude of travel options in a single action, well, that’s still a few upgrades away.

Since early 2016, the Go Denver app has amassed more than 16,000 downloads and about four-times as as many user sessions across the swelling city. But just one ride-share provider, Lyft, has synced up one-step payment options with the app’s unique map and search functionality.

“Each of these different companies has their own fiscal rules, and they have strong user bases with their own apps,” said Cindy Patton, acting manager of parking and mobility services at Denver Public Works.

Denver’s innovative project has hit on a familiar snag for the increasingly digital world of transportation: how can payment be seamless for users and streamlined for agencies? In the Mile High City and across the U.S., government and tech experts more and more see opportunity rather than obstacles near future of integrated fare collection and payment.

At the Federal Transit Administration, Vincent Valdes, associate administrator of research, demonstration and innovation, finds promise in “several proven and promising” technologies, including those at San Francisco’s BART and the Chicago Transit Authority. The FTA’s Mobility on Demand research portfolio — an $8 million “sandbox” under a larger Department of Transportation research effort — aims for local and linked solutions to the funding conundrum.

“At this stage, however, there is no single technology or approach that fulfills all the technical requirements of integrated fare payment and collection,” Valdes said. “An ideal technology would integrate advancements in electronic payments, automated and autonomous vehicles, as well as mobile- (and) web-based trip planning and communications.”

Equal to the tech challenges in fare education for transportation providers are those around communications with riders about their problems and preferences, according to Pat Elizondo, V.P., global sales and business development, Conduent, Public Sector, Transportation, which worked on the Go Denver pilot and a similar project for Los Angeles. On New Jersey Transit's routes, mobile payment is connected to retail opportunities for riders, a small but important step toward enhancing the way riders pay, Elizondo said. In Los Angeles, drivers who opted for public transit received upgrade credits toward “hot lane” use during heavy traffic, another perk with connected transit rider and fare data.

“[In L.A.] it’s about education and positive rewards to change behavior in that balance between public transportation and still needing to use your cars,” she said.

David Roat, strategy manager at longstanding transit payment provider Cubic Transportation Systems, puts the challenge — and inevitability — around integrated fare collection in the context of the wider global context of people moving to cities. As transit agencies respond to the demands from the “hyper-urbanization” of ridership, Roat said they’re looking for less lock-in with technology platforms and hardware that may be quickly outdated.

One answer Cubic is exploring takes the digital token aspect of past pre-pay and post-pay projects into Bluetooth and NFC, and farther out to emerging fields like biometrics and facial recognition. Roat said it is part of a larger discussion on providing all the options for the pending wave of data and payment streams previously left for William Gibson sci-fi novels.

“We’re in that mode of asking, ‘Is the technology up to the job?’ ‘Could it work in a city the scale of Chicago and be accurate enough?’ And then we need to find out where we are, in terms of social acceptance, with something like facial recognition as a token of travel,” he said.

How agencies get to unified payment today may be best left out of their hands. Valdes of the FTA said a mix of trends and traveler preferences point to outsourcing of comprehensive payment, fare and accounting as a potential speedy answer for integration.

“Many public transportation operators believe this would allow them to focus on core operations and service while realizing efficiencies,” he said.

And back in Denver, there is enthusiasm around Go Denver based on the app’s early adoption and a budding relationship with Regional Transit District. Patton said the next version of the app — something that could be introduced in 2018 — should get a boost in use from more comprehensive booking options. And those increased payment connections in the app may be desirable to businesses that want to be linked to new or hidden audiences, including Denver’s burgeoning Millennial population.

As Patton put it: “We have some work to do to demonstrate that a municipal-sponsored, regionally-supported solution can unlock a new market for these folks, who may never have thought to use their transportation service in combination with something outside."

Justin Kern is a freelance writer out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.