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Two weeks in and Auckland Transport (AT) has clocked a quarter of a million trips using the new contactless payment option on public transport.
Last month, AT introduced contactless payment with cards and smartdevices for travel on buses, ferries and trains (Hibiscus Matters, October 21). However, concession fares and the weekly fare cap are still only available to those using AT’s HOPcard.
Auckland Transport’s chief executive Dean Kimpton said AT’s public transport, technology and customer service teams, together with AT HOP partner Hitachi Rail GTS, had spent more than 18 months working on the roll-out of the contactless payments, including planning and testing.
“So far we’re seeing the most demand from people using contactless payments on the weekend, and using our train and ferry services,” Kimpton said.
Hitachi Rail GTS’ general manager Denise Burns said the roll-out had its challenges because it covered buses, trains and ferries all at once.
“We had both hardware and software releases planned in stages to allow us to update the technology in the background without causing issues for public transport customers. We started installing the first new ‘validators’ that people use for tagging off and on back in April while we continued to make the software changes needed for us to go live [with contactlesss payments] in November.
“There was a huge amount of planning needed to make sure the go-live was as seamless as possible because of the unique challenge of making changes to buses, trains and ferries,” Burns said.
