Transit agencies in the U.S. and beyond will be watching to see whether a recent gambit by major agency Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to hire small Australia-based payments service provider Littlepay over its large incumbent supplier, Cubic Transportation Systems, pays off.
WMATA made the unexpected move, as Mobility Payments reported earlier this month, to award an important contract to Littlepay to carry out the agency’s “Open-Payment Overlay” project. The overlay–one of the few projects of its kind globally–seeks to add open-loop acceptance on top of the agency’s existing network of closed-loop terminals quickly and cheaply.
It means that WMATA will have to continue to maintain a completely separate legacy closed-loop system, likely for years to come, using older card-based ticketing technology.