Paperless ticketing is finally expected to debut on Metra as early as this fall, enabling riders to buy and display virtual tickets on their smartphones and pay with a Ventra account or a credit or debit card.
But transit officials are backing away from earlier promises that CTA and Pace riders will be using the new Ventra mobile application to pay their fares by early next year. Those riders will have to settle for being able to add money to their Ventra accounts via smartphones and other mobile devices.
The rollout of the free app — which will be available for iOS and Android devices — has been fraught with delays. The public launch is more than five months behind schedule, according to a contract with the developer who has not been paid yet, and the transit agencies still haven’t set an actual release date.
Meanwhile, hundreds of volunteers and agency employees have been testing a beta version of the app for months to work out glitches.
“We promised that we would test, test, and test the app some more until it met our high standards and was an excellent product for our customers,” a CTA spokeswoman said.
The Tribune also tested the app this week. Overall, the app appears to offer many appealing features, albeit amid some annoyances.
The app’s key benefit is that it will allow Metra customers to forgo paper tickets and passes. It also makes buying them easier and cashless — another step into the 21st century for the commuter rail agency and its 300,000 daily riders.
Although app users won’t need to fumble around with monthly passes and 10-ride tickets, they will need to keep their smartphones on hand and at the ready.
That’s because the process of activating a virtual ticket and allowing a conductor to validate it requires more customer involvement than the paper-ticket system.
Currently, riders can put their 10-ride ticket or monthly pass on the seat clip in front of them, then go about their normal routine, whether it’s diving into a book or newspaper, firing up a laptop or napping. The conductor can visually check passes or punch tickets without bothering the customers.
With the Ventra app, however, a customer must activate a ticket on the phone’s screen at the right time, then wait for the conductor to come by and visually validate the tickets.
Interviews with Metra customers showed a clear generation gap: One 27-year-old at Union Station thought the app was “cool,” while a 60-ish rider admitted he was “technologically illiterate” and had neither the right phone nor interest in using the app.
Metra officials say mobile ticketing is a supplementary system and the old-fashioned paper tickets will remain an option.
The Tribune found that an iPhone 5s needed a software upgrade before the app could be loaded. The actual downloading itself also required the installation of iTunes. Neither step is a major hurdle by any means, but does require some patience and effort.
The Ventra account balance and information was readily available. Buying Metra tickets was only a few clicks away, and so was the choice of paying via an existing Ventra account or with a credit or debit card. Another handy feature the app offers is a comprehensive “Transit Tracker” with real-time train and bus arrival information and nearby route locations.
Metra and CTA officials said they will launch an educational campaign to help shorten the learning curve.
Transit agency employees will need to be brought up to speed as well. A reporter found this out as he tried to use the app Monday upon boarding a Chicago-bound Metra BNSF train in Lisle with a 10-ride ticket already loaded onto his Ventra smartphone app.
A conductor walking through the aisle punching paper tickets and verifying paper monthly passes reached the seat of the reporter, who held up the phone. But the conductor kept walking, never asking for the fare, before the reporter could push the “use” button on the app to pay for the ride.
The experience showed that the new app won’t prevent some Metra users from getting free rides, a long-standing problem. If a rider doesn’t activate his virtual ticket, and a conductor doesn’t check the phone, the fare won’t be charged.
The mobile app was announced almost a year ago, then missed a spring launch date because glitches needed to be worked out, transit officials said.
“We are very much in the testing phase,” CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase said.
Testers include several hundred transit employees and volunteers, including the Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Civic User Testing Group, a pool of Chicago residents who try out new apps under development.
The app’s developer, Cubic Transportation Systems Chicago Inc., has already missed two critical “milestones” in its $2.5 million contract with the transit agencies.
The contract called for a multiphase launch starting April 23 with more functionality added on Aug. 20. Neither of those deadlines was met, and Cubic has not been paid $1,173,529 per the contract. Future phases call for adding a more sophisticated trip planner, which would let riders create itineraries for the three transit systems; allowing CTA and Pace riders to pay fares with the app; and enabling Metra tickets to be printed at home.
The contract, which runs hundreds of pages, spells out specific obligations and timetables. “It is mutually understood and agreed by (the parties) that time is of the essence with respect to completion of each of the milestones,” the contract states.
In case of any failure on the part of Cubic to achieve “Go-Live” dates for each phase, the transit agencies “will be damaged,” the contract said.
Nevertheless, the CTA said the dates in the contract are merely “proposed” and that the agencies agreed to more testing. “There is no contractual date for the app to be released, nor is there is a contractual schedule to be met,” Chase said.
Documents show that’s the case only under the original Ventra contract that the CTA alone signed with Cubic in 2011. The contract said development of the Ventra system “will permit” CTA customers to pay fares with mobile phones, but it did not spell out any requirement or set any dates for implementation.
Meanwhile, the cost of the Ventra system has increased from $454 million under the initial contract to roughly $520 million since Pace and Metra joined.
Cubic’s recent performance problems are not the first setbacks under the Ventra system. A variety of technical glitches and customer-service issues plagued Ventra during its rollout two years ago, prompting the CTA to temporarily suspend the phaseout of the old transit cards and withhold payment to Cubic until it complied with contract terms in 2014. The problems ranged from the slow processing of fare payments when riders tapped their Ventra cards on readers, to severe under-staffing at Cubic customer call-in centers.
When the app is finally released, CTA and Pace customers will be able to purchase transit value on the app, something they already can do at www.ventrachicago.com, at Ventra vending machines or through employer-sponsored programs like WageWorks. They won’t be able to pay fares on their mobile devices until an unspecified future date, even though transit officials said in March that CTA and Pace riders would be able to by early next year.
The process is barely underway to solve technology issues to make the Ventra app compatible with Ventra fare readers on CTA and Pace buses and at CTA rail stations, as well as reaching agreements with third-party vendors including Apple and Google to provide service, the CTA said.
“The Ventra readers do not have optical scan capability — they cannot read bar codes. We have to develop a way to read the near-field-communication phones,” Chase said.
Collecting fares on Metra is more complicated than on the CTA or Pace because Metra riders board trains freely instead of passing through turnstiles like CTA rail riders. And Metra’s fares are distance-based, meaning the farther the ride, the more expensive the ticket.
Shifting from paper tickets to virtual tickets will require a cultural change as well as acceptance from leery conductors. One Metra conductor predicted it will be a nightmare when, instead of the small test pool of users, thousands of commuters are trying to pay fares with the app.
“Most people won’t have their ticket up on the screen and ready like you did,” the conductor told a reporter. “They’ll be playing games on their phones or reading emails and we’ll never be able to collect all the fares.”
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