Umoney smart card system has to get smart for real
There are about 1,200 buses which give rides in 79 routes in urban and sub-urban areas run by 21 companies, which makes up the public transportation service in Ulaanbaatar...
...The UMoney system has a lot of potential to improve public transportation and thereby contribute to tackling Ulaanbaatar’s crippling traffic congestion problem...
There are about 1,200 buses which give rides in 79 routes in urban and sub-urban areas run by 21 companies, which makes up the public transportation service in Ulaanbaatar. The bus smartcard project, UMoney, was unveiled in 2014 and has been officially and publicly in effect since July 24, 2015.
At that time, when there was a bus conductor, there was already an issue with people riding without paying. Thus, many people believed that the new system would not work, that it was not time for Mongolia to adopt such a system. It was also critical that people would get used to getting on and off the bus on their own, without anyone on duty to monitor.
In any event, the project started in 2015 and people had an option to pay in cash, or use their smartcard. It had been an issue that many were not putting the right fare into the box in buses. For this and other reasons, the City Transportation Authority decided to restrict payments in cash in buses in late 2015.
While some aspects of the public transportation have comparatively improved, for example, this UMoney smart card system and UBike public bike service based on smartphone apps, progress on taxi services in Mongolia on the other hand have “frozen” due to the Mongolian National Standard (MNS) 5122:2011, which prohibits public taxi services from using smartphone apps and requires taxi services to only use telephone call bookings or taxi stops.
Although the bus service payment method has been progressed to the next level, there are still some issues that the “smart” system should have resolved. The first issue is that the City Transportation Center prohibits passengers without cards. In other words, those who do not have a card are not allowed to take the bus, but there are not enough places that you can purchase or top-up the card. There are many bus stops where there are no card purchasing or top-up stations at all, which means some won’t be able to ride the bus or must go and find card facilities elsewhere.
In most countries this kind of smart system, one-way cash tickets are always available.
Secondly, transfers from broken or faulty cards take several hours. You must go to a center (there are only four centers in the whole city) and these are only open on weekdays during business hours -- 08:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. In fact, what that center does is to transfer the money using the same machine that card charging stations and shops use. In other words, it should be possible to conveniently transfer your credit to a new card.
Thirdly, unlike some other systems, the card itself is paid. In other words, you have to pay 3,600 MNT to get card without any credit. In other countries, the card you buy comes with some credit.
Besides these three issues, the bus companies could use all the precious data they collect or possibly could collect from customers and their card usage and organize the bus service in a way that is effective and customerfriendly. For example, it is quite difficult to take a bus early in the morning, especially when high school and university students take rides to school. Since the bus service companies already have those data, they could improve logistics management based on the data from the smart card system.
All in all, the UMoney system has a lot of potential to improve public transportation and thereby contribute to tackling Ulaanbaatar’s crippling traffic congestion problem. Although most people who use public transportation have gotten used to the system, when issues arise there is lack of support from public transportation companies to resolve simple problems that can be addressed with minor adjustments to the service. Providing accessible public transportation services is critical for Ulaanbaatar to address it’s traffic congestion problem but the current difficulties and hindrances associated with bus services pushes more people to purchase cars to facilitate their need for a convenient transportation, which only aggravates the problem at hand.