New ticket to ride: Smart card

When college student Terrence Evans rushes to catch the Metro subway in Washington, he barely slows down at the turnstile.

Without breaking stride, he waves a plastic card over the turnstile and hurries on his way. He doesn't even have to take the card out of his wallet. A computer chip in the card is scanned by a reader atop the turnstile.

"It's a lot more convenient," said Evans, 17, a student at the University of Maryland. "You just tap it and go."

The "smart card" - sort of an E-ZPass for straphangers - is replacing tickets and tokens at transit systems around the country. By summer, riders on the PATCO High-Speed Line will get them.

For SEPTA and NJ Transit riders, though, smart cards remain a distant dream.

Washington, Boston, New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle and Houston are among the regions moving to transit smart cards, with plans to eventually enable the cards to pay for parking, coffee, newspapers and other sundries of the commuting life.

And there's hope of connecting neighboring systems with compatible cards so riders can travel from, say, Philadelphia to New York with a single card.

At the same time, some transit agencies - including SEPTA - are pondering a direct leap to smart credit-card technology, allowing customers to pay a fare simply by waving a new-generation Visa or MasterCard over a turnstile.

"We're right on the cusp of one of those sea changes in the entire payments industry," said Greg Garback, chief finance officer for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and chairman of the Smart Card Alliance board of directors, an industry association. "We're seeing a billion-dollar investment cycle that is reaching maturity."

PATCO, the 14-mile rail line between Center City and Lindenwold, will be the first local transit agency to switch to the plastic cards with embedded computer chips and miniature antennas. Its "Freedom" card will also work in PATCO parking lots.

John J. Matheussen, chief executive officer of the Delaware River Port Authority and president of PATCO, said the agency hoped to begin general use of the card within "the next couple of months." The settlement this month of a long-standing dispute between Pennsylvania and New Jersey over dredging of the Delaware River, which had frozen much of the port authority's budget, will allow the hiring of customer-service agents to handle the new card.

"We're pretty high on this. . . . We're really looking to get it out to our customers," Matheussen said of the system, which has cost his agency about $12.5 million. "If they want, they'll never have to go to a ticket vending machine again."

Customers will load value on the card with cash or a credit card. The card can be permanently linked to a credit or debit card for automatic replenishment.

About 20,000 to 30,000 cards will be issued to PATCO riders, Matheussen said.

The existing plastic fare cards will be phased out, and turnstiles replaced with larger fare gates. About 2,000 smart cards have been issued in a pilot program, and glitches are still being ironed out, Matheussen said.

SEPTA and NJ Transit are largely waiting to see what technologies prevail. With a full-fledged smart-card system costing as much as $100 million, agencies may find it much cheaper to let the credit-card industry develop a smart credit card that pays for passage on their buses and trains.

"There may be distinct advantages to waiting or, as we say, strategically lying in wait," Garback said. "They may be able to bypass directly to an open-payments platform - like a bank card."

SEPTA hopes to have a new fare system ready in three or four years, said Jerry Kane, manager of capital program planning. One challenge, Kane said, is that many SEPTA riders don't have credit cards, so any system would need to accept cash, too.

SEPTA officials are watching with interest New York's experience on its Lexington Avenue subway line, where Citibank and MasterCard paid to put in smart-card readers for their bank cards.

"That gives us a new option to look at," Kane said. "It may be that a MasterCard or Visa or American Express could come in, and we could just be one of the retailers that use their card."

SEPTA riders have noticed that other agencies are moving as SEPTA waits. Anthony DeSantis, president of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, told SEPTA's board on Thursday, as part of a litany of things that passengers don't like: " . . . They complain that while other systems are giving their customers smart cards, SEPTA continues to demand exact change."

NJ Transit will implement a smart-card pilot program on its buses in Jersey City by midyear, spokesman Dan Stessel said. The cards will be compatible with the system being developed for PATH trains to New York. And new ticket vending machines being installed by NJ Transit will include smart-card technology.

"We're also watching closely what other transit systems are doing with credit cards or debit cards," Stessel said. "So we're moving on two tracks, pursuing smart cards and watching what credit-card companies are already doing."

Washington, which issued its first "SmarTrip" cards in 1999, is probably farthest down the smart-card road among American transit agencies. It has issued about 2.3 million cards, for which riders pay $5 each, and the cards are used to pay for about 60 percent of the Metro's 750,000 rail trips and 22 percent of the 450,000 bus trips each day. And they're mandatory for entrance to Metro parking lots.

Mike Gill, who commutes from Rockville, Md., said the smart card made paying faster and easier and eliminated the need for a paper transfer from subway to bus. His only complaint was that the Metro provided no discount for using the card.

In Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is taking delivery of 3.5 million smart cards to use on its subways and buses. It is offering discounts of 15 percent to 50 percent for riders who use the "Charlie Cards."

The San Francisco region is developing a smart-card system that will be compatible across 26 transit agencies and work on subways, ferries, buses, trains, and maybe even cable cars. But timetables have slipped, with mounting costs and frustrating electronic glitches. Now officials hope to have the system in place by 2010, said John Goodwin, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

"The software, the 'business rules' - that's proved to be a much bigger task than we had imagined," Goodwin said.

The San Francisco region has only about 6,200 of its "TransLink" cards in circulation, about half of them used on Golden Gate ferries and buses connecting to Marin, Sonoma and other counties.

The future of smart cards may lie in their adaptability to other uses. With built-in "electronic purses," the cards could be used for cashless purchases along a commuter's trip - a cup of coffee, a bouquet of flowers, a book. Those "micro-payments" are the new frontier for bank-card companies.

"The technology is there now," said Dave Ludin, vice president of Gemalto North America, the largest U.S. maker of transit smart cards, with a factory near Montgomeryville. "The question is, how much functionality do they want for the transit card? . . . We do see demand for the electronic purse."