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The NFC Update That Matters Isn’t the Tap. It’s the Onboarding.
Google pushed out Play Services v26.35 on September 8, and buried in the changelog was a line easy to skim past: Android phones can now use NFC to read a physical transit card and add it, balance included, straight into…
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New York’s $1.1 Billion Fare Gate Plan Is Really a Vendor Scorecard
Governor Hochul and the MTA announced on October 7 that the first 20 subway stations fitted with new fare gates saw fare evasion drop by an average of 35% over roughly the past year. At two stations, Hoyt-Schermerhorn in Brooklyn…
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Clipper 2.0’s Outages Aren’t a Technology Story. They’re a Migration Story.
On the night of May 18, 2026, Clipper 2.0 went dark across the Bay Area. Ticket vending machines threw a cryptic “verify failure and limit” message, fare inspection devices dropped offline, and riders couldn’t check their account balances. The outage…
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Two Fare Projects, Two Very Different Clocks
I’ve been tracking two fare-system projects this year that make an interesting pair, not because they’re similar but because they’re not. Both are North American transit agencies rebuilding how riders pay. Both involve real construction, real vendors, and real money.…
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The Chip Inside the Tap: Why Transit’s Next NFC Upgrade Isn’t About Speed
Denver’s RTD is now processing thousands of contactless fare taps a month. Underneath that success, two quieter developments in NFC reader interoperability and post-quantum secure elements will decide whether today’s transit payment hardware still holds up in ten years.
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Metrobus Goes Systemwide, Metrolink Bets on the World Cup, and Connecticut Hits a Procurement Wall
Three transit payment stories crossed my feed this year that are worth reading together rather than separately, because each one is solving a completely different version of the same problem: how do you get contactless fare payment live without breaking…
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Fare Capping Is Easy to Announce and Hard to Build
Toronto’s TTC turned on fare capping September 1. So did MTA’s OMNY (a rolling 7-day cap) and St. Louis Metro Transit’s brand-new Masabi ABT platform. Three agencies, three different back-end architectures hiding behind the same simple promise.
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The Real Risk in TransLink’s $507 Million Fare RFP Isn’t the Price Tag
TransLink’s Compass RFP has grown from $220 million to $507 million before a vendor is even picked. A look at what that number actually means, and what Boston’s MBTA AFC 2.0 program can teach about structuring the contract that comes…
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The Tap-to-Pay Wave Hitting North American Transit in 2026
NJ Transit, ORCA, Apple Pay, and California’s Clipper 2.0 all went live with contactless fare payment this year. Here’s what the wave of 2026 tap-to-pay launches actually reveals about transit payment modernization, NFC technology, and the program management work underneath…
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Modernizing Transit Payments: What U.S. Agencies Are Getting Right Heading Into 2027
Fare collection has quietly become one of the highest-leverage investments a transit agency can make. Legacy systems built around cash and magnetic stripe cards are past their useful life, and riders now expect the same frictionless experience they get from…