Photo: Justus_Brown_Directions

New alliance to develop standardised method for buying transit tickets

23 July 2015

by Nick Michell

HERE, a Nokia company and leader in mapping, navigation and location services, has announced that, along with partners in the public and private sector, it is forming the Open Mobile Ticketing Alliance (OMTA), an effort to develop global standards that would allow people to buy public transit tickets from a single app on their mobile devices in cities worldwide.

The aim of the Open Mobile Ticketing Alliance is to enable the vision of ‘Register once, travel anywhere’ by developing open, interoperable standards with payment vendors and transit operators.

“As smartphones increasingly become part of our lives, we believe consumers expect to be able to buy transit tickets on the go,” Justus Brown, Head of Urban Mobility at HERE and OMTA Chairman told Cities Today. “Mobile ticketing satisfies that expectation, but the consumer still needs to do a lot of work to travel in each system – find and set up an app, discover which fares are needed and add a method of payment. OMTA allows apps and off-the-shelf technology to interoperate across systems. If successful, OMTA will drive increased transit usage, which is not only good for the environment, but should also lower costs for passengers and transit agencies.”

Other founding members include transport service providers Scheidt & Bachmann and Thales, and mobile payment provider Verifone Mobile Money. Public transit authorities implementing solutions based on OMTA benefit from lower fare-collection costs, while passengers can get the lowest possible fare based on how often they ride.

Instead of buying a ticket or reloading an electronic card, passengers will register with the service once and then they can tap phones enabled with Near Field Communication technology at transit systems around the globe in order to travel. The Open Mobile Ticketing Alliance helps standardise the communication between phone and transit infrastructure and facilitates roaming between systems so that users can use an app they are familiar with rather than starting from scratch each time they travel to a new city.

“The point of developing the OMTA standards is to build an application that works across cities and systems,” said Brown. “We also want to improve the user experience beyond what you can do with cards, which don’t have a user interface for riders to find out key information concerning their journey. Additionally, there are many transit systems in the world, which cannot justify the expense of installing gates and active readers in each station. OMTA also provides an ideal, low-cost way to bring mobile ticketing to these systems that allows the journey to continue past the non-gated world, into a gated or active-validation transit systems.”

Over the past few months Alliance members have showcased results from pre-commercial pilots started last year and demonstrated a solution based on the OMTA standard and the HERE Maps application. HERE Maps is available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone and already allows users to plan public transit journeys in hundreds of cities around the world.

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