INIT Receives METRO Innovative Solutions Award for Virtual Card Integration in TriMet E-Fare Project

INIT, Innovations in Transportation Inc. was recently presented the 2018 Innovative Solutions Award from METRO Magazine for the delivery of the TriMet open payment Hop Fastpass system. The award was presented on October 3, at the Indianapolis Convention Center during the Annual BusCon Conference. The Hop Fastpass project, launched in the Portland-Vancouver Metro Area in July 2017, was the first in the world to integrate a regional, account-based, virtual transit fare card through Google Pay. The virtual transit card allows TriMet, C-TRAN and Portland Streetcar passengers to pay fares using a stored virtual Hop card in Google Wallet. TriMet, INIT, and moovel worked to enable this ground-breaking development with Google Pay.

The revolutionary open payment Hop system gives riders the ability to pay with a regular Hop card, virtual card, contactless bank card, or mobile wallet, and frees them from the worry associated with how many, or what kind of tickets they should buy. They simply tap, hop on and ride.

INIT’s back-end processing system, MOBILEvario, serves as the core intelligence for the project processing all forms of payment for the multi-agency system including physical debit or credit cards or digital versions stored in Apple Pay and Samsung pay, and now virtual Hop Fastpass transit cards via Google Pay.

The system also offers riders social equity through fare capping. A rider never pays more than the cost of a day pass or a month pass, which provides more cost-effective transportation options for travel throughout the Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area.

TriMet and C-TRAN have the added benefit of an operations control and real-time passenger information system from INIT. The addition of the open payment e-fare component allows the agencies to realize a fully integrated Intelligent Transportation System. Due to INIT’s flexible and modular solution design, the e-fare module was installed within all Portland Streetcars without the need to interface with an operations control system.