Smart cards promise to make paying for transit easy

System will eliminate tickets, monthly passes, but cash fare will remain option

Edmonton Transit officials will be doing site visits next week to finalize plans for new transit smart cards — a new payment option promising to make buying a ticket as easy as buying a coffee.

The smart cards should allow transit riders to swipe onto the bus, and will be reloadable from a home computer or credit card. They’re intended to replace transit tickets and monthly passes — currently sold for cash in LRT stations and credit or cash at convenience stores — and better integrate with regional bus systems.

Eddie Robar, head of Edmonton Transit, said he won’t have a clear timeline until after the contract for the new project is signed with a vendor. But that moment is close, he said, after answering questions on a range of new customer-service initiatives at community services committee Monday.

“We’d still have cash, obviously. You’ll never get rid of cash,” said Robar, explaining a $42-million project that will be cost-shared with the province, St. Albert and Strathcona County. But “if you want to load your card, you don’t have to go to a store or anything like that, you can just go to a website.”

Edmonton’s transit advisory board sparked Monday’s debate on customer service with their own evaluation of how the service is doing today. They found a lot of room for improvement, not just with the big issues — reliability and schedules — but also with smaller annoyances.

“It’s the little things,” said Sean Lee, who presented on behalf of the advisory board. “I can buy a cup of coffee with my phone, with a credit card or anything else. But sometimes I can’t get on the bus because I don’t have change available and it’s not convenient to get it.

“Put them together and it’s very frustrating,” said Lee.

The board made eight recommendations from creating codes of conducts for transit and riders to increasing accountability by having officials issue daily, monthly and quarterly reports on their reliability targets.

Mayor Don Iveson said that accountability is the piece he found most intriguing. The trains are pretty reliable, but he’d like to see new data for Edmonton’s buses.

“That data is helpful for the public in determining if they’re getting the kind of service that they want,” he said. If the numbers continue to show problems, that would boost support for spending the money to improve.

The committee asked Edmonton Transit to study the advisory board’s recommendations and report back on what it has already implemented or is working on May 26.

You’ll never get rid of cash. If you want to load your card, you don’t have to go to a store or anything like that, you can just go to a website.