Near Field Communications Handsets and Tags, NFC Pilots and Projects

Bay Area's TransLink sees its 16-year one card goal within reach

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Some agencies holding out but vast majority are online

TransLink appears poised to finally live up to the scenario first imagined 16-years ago of providing San Francisco Bay transit riders one card that would be good on all 24 agencies serving the area.

The one card is now operational at five of the area’s transit systems, two which handle 75% of the daily ridership. That would include San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, known simply as Muni, and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), as well as three smaller agencies, AC Transit (Alameda-Contra Costa), Caltrain and Golden Gate Transit.

The only exception to that list are San Francisco’s famed cable cars operated by Muni, which have not yet been outfitted with readers, says Jake Avidon, TransLink senior program coordinator for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Oakland, Calif.

There are 1183 words in the rest of this article …

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The Smart Card Alliance Transportation Council has published a white paper examining how the transit industry can best make use of NFC technology.

“One of the major challenges facing transit agencies today is how to capitalize on the ever-growing popularity of mobile phones with a solid mobile strategy,” said Transportation Council Chairman Craig Roberts. “This white paper builds on the knowledge base developed in earlier white papers to foster a greater understanding of NFC technology, explain its role in the transit industry, and shed light on key issues facing the transit industry in developing a mobile strategy.”

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KT Corporation, Korea’s largest teleco, is predicting that 20 million NFC-enabled phones will be in the hands of South Koreans by the end of 2012 – accounting for nearly 40% of the country’s total population, according to NFC World.

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Cubic Transportation Systems, distributor of the electronic transit Clipper card, has responded to the recent news of a Ph.D. student in IT Security allegedly breaking the encryption in Clipper and similar transit cards.

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The Bay Area’s Clipper transit fare collection program has reached the millionth milestone - 1 million active cards in circulation.

As of Dec. 16, there were 1,000,606 active Clipper cards in use, nearly a 30% increase from the 778,197 active cards in circulation six months ago, and a 142% increase from the 413,616 active cards in circulation a year ago.

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A Chinese couple who used stolen identity information from students at Simon Fraser University in Canada to obtain TransLink U-Passes, have been deported.

Siyuan Gu and Jing Wang pleaded guilty in December to using the forged documents.

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The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is teaming up with BART and SamTrans to host a series of sign up events as a push to transition more youths from paper tickets passes to the reloadable Clipper transit fare card.

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