Metro riders may soon pay their fares with a wave of their smart-phones or swipe of a federal ID card. The transit agency on Thursday announced that it is seeking companies to help it upgrade its fare system so riders don’t have to load up cash on their plastic SmarTrip farecards. Instead riders could use their bank cards, credit cards or phones that are embedded with chips to deduct the correct fare and even tap into their SmartBenefits.
“We want to make it even easier for our customers to use Metro,” Board Chairman Peter Benjamin said in a written statement. “Just as SmarTrip revolutionized how customers paid their fares a decade ago, we look for this new system to be equally dramatic in the eyes of our customers.”
Metro officials have met with their peers in New York who are testing their own open-payment system. Chicago and Philadelphia also are developing similar ones.
The project has been in the works locally for a while. Metro’s board members gave initial permission in May 2009 and the agency had hoped to seek proposals from financial institutions more than a year ago.
The idea is to reduce the exchange of cash. An increasing number of people already pay for their transit trips with credit and debit cards, according to the agency, but the new system would let riders skip the step of loading money onto SmarTrip cards or paper farecards.
It also would let the agency focus on moving people, not money. A special train ferries around cash collected throughout the rail system, a pricey endeavor that the agency hopes to eliminate or at least minimize.
Still, Metro leaders say they do not plan to get rid of the 1.8 million SmarTrip cards that are currently in use. The existing system will remain in place while the new system is developed.
It’s not yet clear when the open-payment system could begin or how much it would cost. Metro spokeswoman Angela Gates called it a “multiyear process.”
But the agency faces some pressure to create a new system. The existing fare system has caused Metro trouble, forcing the agency to delay fare increases this summer after it ran into problems upgrading the equipment. It also lost an estimated $500,000 in parking fees because of a software glitch at about 18 parking lots.
Furthermore, the agency also has a limited supply of SmarTrip cards left because the computer chip inside the cards is no longer being manufactured.
The agency’s supply of cards is expected to last about two more years.
