Ventra app coming to commuters next year
The long- promised day many CTA, Metra and Pace riders have been waiting for should arrive next year, when the three agencies expect to launch ticketing via smartphone, officials said Wednesday.
Testing of the app should start in February. A launch across all three agencies is planned for May. The CTA will add the most complicated feature— tapping the cellphone app on a fare reader to register payment — in late 2015 or early 2016.
Particularly thrilled about the new option were officials at Metra, which has been the slowest agency to fully adopt the CTA’s new Ventra fare payment system. They even showed up at the CTA’s monthly board meeting Wednesday to talk about it.
For Metra riders, customers in the test sample would be able to purchase a Ventra card on their phone, manage their account by phone, load a ticket onto that phone, and hold up the phone to show the mobile ticket to a conductor, CTA officials said.
“It will be a much faster and easier system,” Metra Chairman Martin Oberman told reporters.
For CTA and Pace riders, the initial test pilot would allow riders to load and manage a Ventra account on their smartphones. Once doing so, they would still have to tap their plastic Ventra card — or contactless credit or debit card — on a CTA bus or rail reader.
The option of merely tapping the Ventra smartphone app onto a reader would launch later.
Although Metra has been slow to jump on the Ventra bandwagon, Metra, CTA and Pace are now working in lockstep on the new Ventra app and will be testing it as “one customer base,” said Mike Gwinn, CTA director of revenue and fare systems.
Another piece of good news for riders: no $ 5 “purchase” fee will be required with Ventra cards purchased via smartphone apps.