Apple Pay With Express Transit Mode Now Available for San Francisco Bay Area's Clipper Card

[anson42]

In London, they keep track at which station you entered the underground, and at which station you exited. And then you pay for the cheapest way to get from A to B.

What I like about The Tube is you don't actually need an Oyster card to use it. As a tourist or local, I can simply tap my phone on entry and exit to pay by credit card the appropriate amount for zones traveled. That seems to me the best of both worlds supporting both regular and non-regular transit users.

 

[tmiw]

What I want is for merchants to stop with the "please sign this" garbage. I always just sign it no sale . What do they expect to be able to do with these pieces of paper? My local pizza joint used to do it right and they recently switched to a new POS system and it requires a signature. Maybe someday .

It's a combination of many merchants simply not trusting the card networks on the "signature not required" thing and restaurants rightly or wrongly believing that tips will be higher if people have to sign. I'm not sure what the best solution is here, unfortunately.

What I like about The Tube is you don't actually need an Oyster card to use it. As a tourist or local, I can simply tap my phone on entry and exit to pay by credit card the appropriate amount for zones traveled. That seems to me the best of both worlds supporting both regular and non-regular transit users.

I suspect Visa, MC, etc. will need to drastically lower interchange for that to happen here (or there to be enough contactless use/demand at regular stores for the transit agencies to justify it). For instance, MTS here in San Diego isn't going to enable that functionality on the new readers (coming online later this year) despite them using the same company that Portland, OR (which enabled that from the start) does. OTOH, at least the functionality is there in case they ever change their minds, plus I suspect we'll eventually at least be able to use Apple and Google Pay to reload the card in their app.

(On that note, I suspect this is also a major reason it took ~6 years and a pandemic for US adoption to get close to what much of the rest of the West has had since the late 2000s. Of course, definitely not the only one.)

 

[retrac1324]

Thanks for this. That makes perfect sense to me. However, that doesn't seem to fully be the case. Under the second of the five FAQs on the Apple Clipper page, it says this (bolded by me in the answer):

What types of physical Clipper cards can I transfer to Apple Wallet?​

You can add Adult, Youth, Senior, and RTC Clipper cards. Translink cards and Clipper cards with some special fare products can’t be added to Apple Wallet3. Be sure to keep your plastic Clipper card for Bay Wheels bikeshare use and your RTC card for fare inspection.

If the card works on Bay Wheels, doesn't that just mean it works?

You can use a Clipper Card to unlock bikes on Bay Wheels, but it cannot use the Clipper Card as a payment method. It just tells the bike which account you are and uses the payment method on the Bay Wheels account.

 

[DekuBleep]

Yes

Where you can ride transit using Apple Pay - Apple Support

Learn where you can use Apple Pay to pay for transit on your iPhone and Apple Watch.

support.apple.com

thanks! Still not in Philly it seems... they announced in 2019 that Philly was going to adopt express transit by the end of 2020, but it hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t even heard anything about it since late 2019.

 

[imaginex20]

Anyone try using Clipper Card via iPhone to pay for parking?