The United States Needs a Universal System to Pay for Public Transit

A company called Cubic Transportation Systems (Cubic) acts as a payment systems integrator for eight of the nine American transit agencies with the most riders—and each of those agencies has its own bespoke system. Complicated transit fare structures and bespoke payment systems make life harder for software companies like ReachNow that build mobile ticketing apps sitting on top of hardware from companies like Cubic. The Transit app would lose its usefulness if public transportation agencies pulled out, so agencies would maintain leverage in how they are presented compared with other mobility services—something that might not happen if they allow tickets to be sold inside the walled garden of a ride hail company like Uber, which RTD in Denver is about to try.

Source: www.citylab.com