“We would like to eventually move to electronic validation, but we don’t have any concrete plans in place for that yet.” “We expect the new app to work just like the old one when we do the cutover later this year, including visual validation,” Jerry Van Wie, fare systems program manager, told Mobility Payments. Users now pay with a stored credit or debit card in the app and show their phones to bus drivers or other agency personnel to validate the tickets and passes.

So for at least the next year or two, Masabi will be offering a similar service as Passport, including selling mobile tickets and passes to riders of local buses, trams, streetcars and commuter trains. It gave UTA only 14 months to get a replacement mobile-ticketing app up and running and forced the agency to issue two requests for proposals–one for the mobile-ticketing service and one for the larger account-based ticketing system. The interim mobile-ticketing contract is mainly concerned with continuity of UTA’s GoRide mobile app, which the agency launched on the Passport platform in 2017, said a UTA staffer.Īs Mobility Payments reported in May, U.S.-based Passport decided to shut down its SaaS ticketing platform at the end of 2022 to focus on its parking mobile-payments business. The new fare-collection system will cover closed-loop, mobile ticketing and also open-loop payments, though UTA likely will not introduce the latter service when the new fare-collection system launches.

Masabi, which is a software-as-a-service platform provider, could submit a bid for this larger project. The interim contract is designed to carry UTA through to the launch of its new account-based ticketing system, which is now in the tendering process. Neither UTA nor Masabi has yet announced the deal.

The transit agency board last week approved a one-year contract with UK-based Masabi, with an option to extend it for another year. The Utah Transit Authority, or UTA, has hired a new mobile-ticketing vendor to replace its current supplier, Passport Labs, which is exiting the ticketing market at the end of the year.

Uta transit authority