The white paper, ”Transit and Contactless Open Payments: An Emerging Approach for Fare Collection,” is meant to provide transit operators with an outline of the opportunities and benefits of accepting contactless open bank cards for fare payment, and to inform the bank card industry of the requirements for transit fare collection. It is available for free download on the Smart Card Alliance site.

The white paper also identifies the challenges in accepting contactless open bank cards for fare payment and potential solutions to these challenges, as well as describes transit implementations, pilots and planned deployments of contactless open bank card payments, including the implementation of the first complete open bank card payment system in Salt Lake City, the pilots in New York City and New Jersey, and planned deployments in Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington DC, Dallas and Toronto.

“Right now we are seeing a clamor for education on contactless open fare payments from agencies of all sizes,” said Craig Roberts, Utah Transit Authority, and chair of the Transportation Council. “We are providing this wide range of resources so agencies updating their fare collection systems have full knowledge of their options.”

Also new is the Open Payment Resources Web page, created for transit agencies to access information on North American transit programs implementing open contactless payments. The page includes descriptions of transit programs and reference documents, the library of Smart Card Alliance transit resources, and an upcoming slide show that explains the basics of open transit payment technology.

The Smart Transit Linkedin Group has also been opened up to Smart Card Alliance members in order to stimulate discussion of transportation industry use of open contactless payments, according to the SCA.

Open payments for transit will be discussed in detail at the Smart Card Alliance 2012 Payments Summit, February 8-10 at the Hilton Salt Lake City Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.