Tag: transportation
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Halifax’s Tap-to-Pay Delay Is a Dependency-Mapping Problem, Not a Vendor Problem
Halifax Transit first told riders that contactless tap-to-pay was coming back in 2019, with a target of 2021. Five years past that date, the system still isn’t live, and the most recent miss is worth looking at closely, because it’s a clean example of a failure mode that shows up constantly in transit payment modernization…
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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 and Nostrand Avenue, the drop was over 70%. That’s the headline number, and it’s a…
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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. But the schedules underneath them are almost opposite, and that contrast says more about transit…
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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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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 next.
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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 every other tap-to-pay interaction in their day. Agencies that treat fare modernization as a technology…