INIT Receives Innovative Solutions Award for Virtual Card in TriMet E-Fare Project

Chesapeake, Va. October 2018

INIT, Innovations in Transportation Inc. was recently presented the 2018 Innovative Solutions Award from METRO Magazine for the delivery of the TriMet open payment Hop Fastpass® system. The award was presented on October 3, at the Indianapolis Convention Center during the Annual BusCon Conference. The Hop Fastpass® project, launched in the Portland-Vancouver Metro Area in July 2017, was the first in the world to integrate a regional, account-based, virtual transit fare card through Google Pay. The virtual transit card allows TriMet, C-TRAN and Portland Streetcar passengers to pay fares using a stored virtual Hop card in Google Wallet. TriMet, INIT, and moovel worked to enable this ground-breaking development with Google Pay.

"INIT has positively impacted the service quality of TriMet, C-TRAN and Portland Streetcar riders by supplying a revolutionary ITS and ticketing system that conveniently connects millions of passengers across three agencies and two states within the Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area." - METRO Magazine

The revolutionary open payment Hop system gives TriMet and C-TRAN riders the ability to pay with a regular Hop card, virtual card, contactless bank card, or mobile wallet, and frees them from the worry associated with how many, or what kind of tickets they should buy.

The Hop Fastpass® project, launched in the Portland-Vancouver Metro Area in July 2017, was the first in the world to integrate a regional, account-based, virtual transit fare card through Google Pay. The virtual transit card allows TriMet, C-TRAN and Portland Streetcar passengers to pay fares using a stored virtual Hop card in Google Wallet. TriMet, INIT, and moovel worked to enable this ground-breaking development with Google Pay.

The revolutionary open payment Hop system gives riders the ability to pay with a regular Hop card, virtual card, contactless bank card, or mobile wallet, and frees them from the worry associated with how many, or what kind of tickets they should buy. They simply tap, hop on and ride.

The core intelligence of the Hop system is INIT’s back-office management tool, MOBILEvario. When a rider taps their Android device with the virtual card to any of the 1,200 INIT fare validators, MOBILEvario calculates the fare, validates the transaction against the back-office account, and displays the fare validation result to the rider in real-time.

MOBILEvario recognizes and processes revenue sharing, as well as manages accounts and automates reconciliations for the three-agency system. Off-line processing is another added benefit of the INIT system. In the event of a network outage, fare payments can still be processed ensuring revenues are not lost.

The system also offers riders social equity through fare capping. A rider never pays more than the cost of a day pass or a month pass, which provides more cost-effective transportation options for travel throughout the Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area.

TriMet and C-TRAN have the added benefit of an operations control and real-time passenger information system from INIT. The addition of the open payment e-fare component allows the agencies to realize a fully integrated Intelligent Transportation System. Due to INIT’s flexible and modular solution design, the e-fare module was installed within all Portland Streetcars without the need to interface with an operations control system.