Metra riders may be able to use their smartphones as their train tickets as early as May if all goes as planned, commuter rail agency officials say.
If a February test with a select group of customers is successful, Metra says all passengers would be able to load a mobile ticketing application on their phones by spring.
“Our customers have waited a long time for this and they deserve it,” Metra Executive Director Don Orseno said. “We want to make sure it’s working right for them.”
The mobile app would make Metra compatible with the Ventra transit card system already in use on the CTA and Pace, officials said.
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Metra has been discussing the concept of mobile ticketing and dangling the prospect of a test since 2012. Officials now say that after a year of consultations with the CTA, Pace and Cubic Transportation Systems, which developed Ventra, Metra is finally ready to jump into paperless ticketing.
Metra’s board approved an agreement Friday with the CTA and Cubic for the system’s development that had been announced two days earlier. Metra officials provided the most detailed description yet of how the system would operate.
“It really does put the vending machine or the ticket agent in your pocket. That’s the beauty of it,” Orseno said.
According to Metra, here’s how mobile ticketing would work:
*Metra customers would use their credit cards or Ventra accounts to buy monthly, 10-ride or one-way tickets and download them on their smartphones.
*As they board trains, customers would activate their electronic tickets on phones.
*When conductors come by, passengers would tap on their phone screens to validate the tickets in view of the conductors. Only passengers, not conductors, would touch the phones. The screens would indicate that the tickets were validated.
Metra intends to introduce mobile ticketing in phases to avoid the kind of glitches that plagued the introduction of Ventra on the CTA.
“The whole idea is not to roll it out and have it implode. We want to roll it out so it’s a good, solid system,” Orseno said.
More features will be added later, including the ability for customers to use their smartphones to seamlessly transfer to CTA and Pace buses and CTA trains, said Lynette Ciavarella, who has been heading Metra’s development team.
By late 2015 commuters could be able to use their phones to tap on to ride a CTA or Pace bus or CTA train, as well as get a train ticket, she said.
Mobile ticketing already is in use in cities including Boston and New York. Metra says its app would be very similar to one used by the TriMet bus system in Portland, Ore.
TriMet was “charting new territory” with its app and conducted extensive testing before its launch, which has proved successful, agency spokesman JC Vanatta said.
A year later, mobile ticketing represents 10 percent of TriMet fare sales, he said.
“We brought a new generation of ticketing to our riders,” Vanatta said.
Mobile ticketing is expected to cost Metra about $500,000 to develop. Other costs include a $100,000-a-year hosting fee and an $875,000 commission to Cubic. Credit card processing fees are estimated at $1.1 million the first year, officials said.
Metra doesn’t plan to end paper tickets, however, and customers won’t have to have smartphones or credit cards to pay for their rides, Ciavarella said.
The app will enable Metra to do a better job of collecting fares and gathering data on customers, officials said.
“This is a technological advancement that will make it more economical to run the system,” Chairman Martin Oberman said.
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