Metro scraps plan for high-tech fare-paying system

After spending $25 million to design and test a new, high-tech fare-paying system for train and bus passengers, Metro said Thursday that it has abandoned the program because the public’s response to it has been tepid.

“The market isn’t there,” General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld said in announcing that Metro has scrapped a plan to install hundreds of subway fare gates and bus fare boxes with “near field communication,” or NFC, technology. Riders would have been able to pay fares simply by waving NFC-ready smartphones or credit cards.

“In the pilot program, we couldn’t even get the right number of people to do the surveys,” Wiedefeld said. “There just aren’t enough people with [NFC] capabilities.”

Going forward with the project to build and install the gates and fare boxes would have cost an additional $150 million, according to Wiedefeld, who said he has terminated a contract for the work, awarded in 2014 to Accenture, a technology company.

The contract is the largest one to be killed by Wiedefeld since he took charge of Metro in late November, with a mission to straighten out the agency’s finances and refocus its spending on immediate, safety-related problems, of which there are many.

WMATA GM Paul Wiedefeld at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Wednesday in Washington. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

When Metro several years ago began planning for an NFC-ready fare-paying system, the technology was widely viewed as the next big thing, with consumers soon to be waving their NFC-chip-equipped digital devices and bank cards to pay for all kinds of products. Metro even planned to produce NFC-ready SmarTrip cards.

“We thought at the time that the market was moving in a certain way, that people would be doing things differently than what they’re doing today,” Wiedefeld said. “And the market hasn’t materialized. It’s just not the reality of what’s played out.”

[Metro once saw “NFC” technology as a wave of the future.]

He said Metro still intends to spend the $150 million on modernizing its fare-collection system, including replacing subway fare gates with newer models. But he said the gates will not be designed for riders who want to use NFC technology.

Last year, from Feb. 23 to May 23, about 400 riders who volunteered to take part in a pilot program used prototype NFC fare-collection machinery in certain Metro stations and on some Metrobus routes. These were people who already owned devices and cards equipped with NFC chips. Metro had hoped that many more than 400 riders would participate.

About 3,000 people initially volunteered to take part in the pilot, but only about 13 percent of them did so. Nevertheless, after finishing a 90-day program, the transit agency said in a report that it was planning for eventual “full deployment.”

By holding a card or phone within a few inches of a gate or fare box, a rider’s fare is added to a credit-card balance or deducted from a bank account.

“Metro’s existing fare collection system is aging rapidly in the context of equipment and systems, and has become too costly to maintain and is severely limited in its flexibility,” according to the report.

“A significant number of customer-participants said [Metro] is moving in the right direction with this program,” the report said. “Generally, the technology tested was found to meet expectations while future changes for smoother implementation were identified.”

The report said: “The accuracy of transactions and reliability of the devices and systems was measured against the expected performance. . . . Generally, performance was determined [to be] acceptable,” although there were “some areas of concern.”

NFC fare-paying systems are in use in the Chicago transit system and several transit systems in Asia, according to Metro.

However, Wiedefeld said, the concept isn’t popular enough with the public to justify a long-term investment in it by Metro.

“The technology has just not gotten to that stage yet,” he said.