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The #YouthCruiser card is a #SmarTrip card that provides #free rides, on all #RideOnMCT buses🚌 and most #Metrobusinfo within the County, to #MontgomeryCoMD residents under 19 years old.
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ANAHEIM, Calif.

The past two weeks of travel have involved different modes of transportation that separately surfaced the same defect on the screen of my aging phone: no support for the default payment system already enabled on the device.

Think of this as a two-hands problem: When a transit app doesn’t let you select Google Wallet or Apple Pay to pay for a ride, most people will have to fish a credit card out of a wallet or purse and hold it in one hand while thumb-typing the card’s digits into the app with the other. That’s not a great customer experience while sitting at a train station or bus stop, considerably worse when standing in a moving train or bus.

(I work around that by using 1Password to fill in saved credit-card info, but many people don’t use third-party password managers.)

The most recent offenders were Bike Share Toronto, which I used to get between two events at Collision two weeks ago, and Metrolink commuter rail in Los Angeles, which I used to get from L.A. to here Wednesday as part of a trip that’s combined getting some time in Waymo robotaxis with covering the VidCon conference here.

Those apps join a list of others that I’ve installed and seen exhibit the same shortfall: Las Vegas’s rideRTC, Boston’s mTicket, the Bay Area’s SMART, and Deutsche Bahn’s DB Navigator. Many of these apps credit the same app framework, Masabi’s Justride; a support note on that U.K. firm’s site mentions Apple Pay support but not Google Wallet, so maybe iPhone users don’t have this issue.

But these other apps on my phone show that paying for a fare on the go doesn’t have to take extra steps: Capital Bikeshare’s CaBi, Metro’s SmarTrip (which until a few months ago, was not in this category), Austin’s CapMetro, the Bay Area’s Clipper, for example.

I’d rather see transit agencies follow the examples of Chicago, New York and Portland by directly supporting tap-to-pay payments in stations and on buses so frequent travelers don’t have to collect transit apps the way infrastructure nerds like me collect transit smart cards. But that may involve a lot more work by transit agencies–and those unable to make that transition yet need to make it easier for customers to give them their money.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/06/29/the-one-feature-every-transit-app-needs-apple-pay-and-google-wallet-support/

#BART #BikeShareToronto #bikeshare #CaBi #CapitalMetro #DBNavigator #Metro #Metrolink #NFC #SMART #SmarTrip #transitCards #transitFare #UX #WMATA

Three weekends ago, my phone did something weird when I tried using it to pay for a few farmers-market purchases: nothing. The Google Wallet app functioned like usual when I opened it and picked the credit card I use for everyday spending, but then tapping the phone to the NFC reader on a merchant’s credit-card terminal yielded no response.

Since all my cards have NFC built-in and since I had my wallet on me, I didn’t waste time trying to debug the problem and just fished out the physical card to complete the purchase. And then I spent a couple of weeks ignoring the problem while it failed to go away on its own.

Venting about this issue on a chat thread with other tech journalists surfaced a troubleshooting suggestion I should have thought to test on my own: see if other apps using the phone’s NFC radio work. I first remembered that I have one weird transit app that solely exists to top up Dublin’s stored-value Leap card, then was relieved to see the app detect the card I’d collected two summers ago when I tapped it to the back of the phone.

Likewise, Metro’s SmarTrip app responded to a tap of my own card. And then on Friday, the Epic Pass app on my phone (yes, I finally got that activated) functioned properly as a wireless, inside-a-ski-jacket lift ticket. So the NFC radio on this phone was clearly fine.

What else could it be? Google’s r/GooglePixel forum surfaced posts reporting similar problems, and one not only reassured me that I wasn’t uniquely snakebit but pointed to a specific remedy that I’ve since seen suggested elsewhere: deleting the cache of the system-level NFC Service app.

Following that required a deeper dive than usual into Android’s Settings app: Tap Apps, tap the “See all” link below the list of recently-opened apps, tap the vertical-ellipsis button at the top right and select “Show system,” then scroll down to select “Nfc Service” (yes, that abbreviation for “Near Field Communication” should be capitalized), then tap “Storage & cache,” then tap “Clear cache.”

“Trash cache” is an old tech-support trick that seems like it shouldn’t work anymore–shouldn’t apps be sufficiently self-aware to know when they’re ingesting corrupted temporary data?–and yet it seems to have worked in this case. Will the fix stick? I sure hope so, at least until the next time Google indulges in yet another mobile-payment-apps reorg.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/02/23/this-months-smartphone-snafu-wayward-google-wallet-behavior/

#EpicPass #GooglePay #GoogleWallet #GPay #LeapTopUp #mobilePayments #NFC #Reddit #SmarTrip #tapToPay

Just boarded a Metrobus with a new fare machine. The SmarTrip and NFC reader is now a separate box. It took me a minute and the help of the driver to get oriented. #RediscoverTheBus #WMATA #Metrobus #DC #SmarTrip

In “… 2022, the federal government predicted that the U.S. would add 5.1 gigawatts of batteries over the course of the year, equating to 11 percent of new power plant capacity. At the close of the year, the count looked more like 5.4 gigawatts …
“Up to 2020, we’d never had a single year break a gigawatt” of storage deployments, said Jason Burwen …” https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/whats-next-for-grid-storage-after-a-booming-but-chaotic-year #EnergyStorage #batteries #Smartrip