The city of Halifax is aiming to roll out an app that would allow transit users to purchase tickets through their phone by the end of the summer, as part of a long-awaited fare system upgrade.
Most other capital cities in Canada – with the exception of Charlottetown, Yellowknife, Whitehorse and Iqaluit (which does not have a public transit system) – have some form of cashless or paperless fare payment, like reloadable transit cards or debit and credit. A tap-and-go pilot program is also in the works for Victoria.
Most recently, in neighbouring New Brunswick, Fredericton Transit launched an open payment system for their bus fleet, allowing transit users to pay fares with their debit or credit card.
But those boarding a Halifax Transit bus or ferry must either pay with exact change, paper tickets or passes purchased at select locations across the city.
Local transit user Brett Feltmate gets a bus pass through his school, but he questions why the transit system still doesn’t have electronic payment.
“I just don’t understand why we don’t have it yet,” he said. “It’s not a system we need to invent. It’s just a system we need to borrow.”
Feltmate, who lives in the Tantallon area, said if people are able to plan their trips in advance, it’s “not that inconvenient.”
But he notes tickets and passes “aren’t super accessible.”
“You can’t just go anywhere and buy them. You have to know where the pre-approved places are,” he said. “For me, being a mobile person, OK, sure, I can deal with it. But if I had any sort of physical limitation, it might not be easy for me to get to those places.”
The municipality has a total of 47 retail partners that sell tickets or bus passes: 22 in Halifax, 11 in Dartmouth, seven in Bedford/Sackville, three in Eastern Passage/Cole Harbour, and one each in Hammonds Plains/Upper Tantallon, Fall River, Porters Lake and Timberlea.
The retail partners are largely made up of convenience stores and drug stores – with varying hours of operation – and there are no self-serve kiosks at major terminals to grab tickets or passes when those stores are closed.
And in some areas, the retail partners may be few and far between, necessitating a bus trip to buy tickets or passes in the first place. Those without tickets or a pass must pay for their fare in exact change.
Coun. Waye Mason, who represents Halifax South-Downtown, described the current system as “antiquated” and acknowledged it’s a problem as cash-carrying becomes less popular.
“There are places where there’s no corner stores or easy places to go get passes, monthly passes or tickets. And that’s a real impediment to folks who rely on the bus system,” he said.
“It’s even harder for people who only occasionally use the bus. You know, I’ve been caught out where I’ve been downtown and I wanted to take the ferry and I didn’t have a ticket, and there’s nowhere nearby to get one.”
Mobile app coming soon
Cashless and paperless payment for transit has been a long time coming. Mason said when he was first elected in 2012, Halifax had “buses with no technology at all.” Since then, the municipality has implemented a new scheduling system, door sensors, and audio/visual stop announcements.
Electronic payment, Mason said, “was always the last phase of the technology upgrades.”
“We had a plan to do a fare box upgrade that was more ticket-based and less tap-based. That’s been set aside, but it was set aside right before COVID and then finding a replacement for a more pay-by-tap tech version took a while,” he said.
The city is now working on a phased approach to bring in more cashless and paperless fare options. In July 2020, regional council voted to approve a plan to move to a mobile app, and last July, it awarded a five-year, $1.5 million contract to tech company Masabi.
Mason said they hope to have the first phase of the plan – which would allow people to purchase tickets through the app, which they can then show the bus driver – by the fall.
“Hopefully at the end of the summer, you’ll be able to show that you paid for a ticket on your phone,” said Mason.
The second phase will involve installing hardware mobile ticket validators on the transit fleet.
The third phase will involve implementing a reloadable plastic card, and the fourth and final phase will enable using debit or credit cards to pay for the fare – which Mason described as being the “holy grail of transportation and transit.”
Mason anticipates the full implementation of the phases should take about 18 months, which he said isn’t too far behind other Canadian cities.
“About half of the big cities in Canada, a little less than half, have pay-by-tap. The other half are all getting it in the next year-and-a-half. So we’re kind of in that second wave of late adopters,” he said.
The other major cities that have had debit and credit fare payment options for a while are “all the biggest cities in the country where the province contributes a lot of money,” Mason added.
“The kind of investments that those early adopters make are beyond what Halifax can do by itself,” he said. “But we’re at a point now where there’s plenty of private sector providers who have off-the-shelf solutions that are affordable that we can do.”
As the plan has been in the works for a while, said Mason, the city hasn’t invested in more places to sell conventional bus tickets.
“It’s really hard to justify spending money on a ticket vending machine for the bridge terminal or the ferry terminal, when you know this technology is coming very soon,” he said.
“The problem is that the contracting has been taking a little bit of time, and the procurement is taking a little bit of time. So, you got this gap of, you know, a couple of years, where we should have had some better solution.
“We’re going to get it now, but I know it’s very frustrating for people.”
Mason also said the city plans to keep accepting conventional bus tickets and cash even when the new technology is implemented.
“It’s not as accessible as it needs to be. And we know that. And that’s why we’re going to invest the money in the new system, for sure.”