Skip to main content

Tri Met and Google team up to trial virtual public transit card

Portland’s Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District (TriMet) has joined forces with Google to create a virtual public transit card via Android Pay. It allows riders to tap and pay their transit fare using a virtual Hop Card stored in their smartphone with Near Field Communication. The service expected to be available to users in the early part of next year following the beta launch in December 2017. Innovations in Transportation’s (INIT’s) back-end processing system, Mobilevario, serves as the
December 14, 2017 Read time: 2 mins

Portland’s Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District (1272 TriMet) has joined forces with Google to create a virtual public transit card via Android Pay. It allows riders to tap and pay their transit fare using a virtual Hop Card stored in their smartphone with Near Field Communication. The service expected to be available to users in the early part of next year following the beta launch in December 2017. 

Innovations in Transportation’s (INIT’s) back-end processing system, Mobilevario, serves as the core intelligence for the project and processes all forms of payment for the multi-agency system.

TriMet riders can tap their device to any of INIT’s 1,200 Proxmobil validators, Mobilevario calculates the fare, validates the transaction against the back-office account, and displays the result in real-time. It is said to provide accurate and up to date account information at any time.

Hot Fast Pass has been designed with an open architecture approach which allowed more than a dozen partners associated with the project to be integrated without changes to the core system.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Milestone for Cubic and Vancouver’s contactless card
    July 21, 2016
    More than one million Compass Cards are now in use for Metro Vancouver’s public transit users since its launch in 2015. Compass Card is the contactless smart card payment system designed and integrated by Cubic for the region’s transportation authority, TransLink. The system is also processing more than 42 million card ’taps’ each month. Compass links all of TransLink’s services and fare products in Metro Vancouver to a single payment system, including West Coast Express, SkyTrain, SeaBus and buses, r
  • TEXpress adds reversible managed lanes
    April 19, 2017
    Land availability restrictions and tidal traffic flows have led to the implementation of a novel managed lane configuration in Texas, as Colin Sowman finds out. Dealing with traffic congestion related to the ‘tidal flows’ caused by large numbers of commuters making their way into major business hubs in the morning and returning to the suburbs in the evening, has seen the widespread use of adaptive signal timing and even reversible lanes.
  • Mobinet counters weighty cross border concerns
    November 9, 2017
    A Mobinet pilot is combining onboard weighing with V2X comms to streamline vehicle weight enforcement. David Crawford reports. Pan-European, cross-border weigh-in-motion (WIM) for trucks is now a practical possibility, following successful Scandinavian trials within the EU-co-funded Mobinet (Internet of Mobility) programme. New technology is using strain sensors, located on load-bearing components and routinely installed in truck fleet management systems.
  • Vehicular networking architecture for local road weather services
    August 19, 2015
    The Finnish Meteorological Institute is currently testing two-way delivery of local weather data as Timo Sukuvaara explains. Road weather information is one of the key ways in which ITS can help reduce traffic accidents and fatalities – which is why the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) has long provided road weather services. Now, the CoMoSeF (Cooperative Mobility Services of the Future) project has been developing communication methodologies to deliver road weather services directly to vehicles and g