Urban mobility: Tap to ride is just the first stop

This week, Mastercard is unveiling a new space in our Amsterdam office to showcase something that doesn’t exist: friction.

For over a decade, we’ve been working to make it easy for people to move around cities by enabling payment for public transportation and micromobility with a tap of their card or smartphone. At the same time, tap and ride simplifies travel and makes operations more efficient for transit agencies and e-bike, scooter and rideshare operators.

Now is the time to expand our vision of a frictionless future by bringing other people on board – literally. Our Amsterdam center is a place to showcase our best technologies and learn best practices in implementing open loop and encouraging its use. We also bring together leaders to debate and shape the future of urban mobility and work with our experts to rapidly prototype solutions to pressing challenges.

Cities are growing rapidly and traffic congestion has returned after a pandemic respite, according to a recent study from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Having more vehicles on the road – from rideshare drivers to delivery trucks – contributes to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, thereby exacerbating climate change.

The need for better, more inclusive mobility solutions is great, and so is the opportunity. In cities around the world, transit systems are aiming to increase ridership by delivering an improved customer experience while trying to modernize infrastructure. Private e-bike and e-scooter operators are also looking for ways to streamline the check-in process, which often causes potential riders to drop out before their first ride. Our leadership in contactless ticketing – also known as open loop – has helped agencies and operators from New York to London to Sydney achieve this.

We chose Amsterdam because the Netherlands is an epicenter of seamless mobility, implementing, with our help, what is considered the world’s first national tap-and-ride ticketing system.

Any visit to our public transport showcase will begin with a journey across the city, taking the train, tram, metro, bus and ferry. Back at our office, you’ll find a bright yellow e-bike equipped for contactless payments, like the hundreds you can find in Lahti, Finland, where we worked with Freebike to enable tap and ride last year. Do you think that the open loop is an investment suitable only for large cities? With Mastercard’s Cloud Commerce software, any smartphone can be transformed into a contactless payment acceptance device: mounted on your bus and ready to use.

Our mobility efforts extend to creating more streamlined and intuitive payment experiences for drivers, including fueling, parking, tolling and electric vehicle charging. You can also see how Mercedes-Benz drivers can make payments via a fingerprint sensor in their dashboard entertainment system.

Navigating Cities with Inclusion in Mind

As open-loop payments become the norm, we are also working purposefully with cities and transportation authorities to ensure there are simple and effective solutions for unbanked and underbanked riders.

A recent Mastercard Economics Institute study on transit deserts found that lack of access to public transportation widens socioeconomic divides, with household incomes and education levels significantly higher where public transportation common are more accessible. Low-income populations often cannot afford to live near a subway line or are excluded when a line is built.

You can’t be financially included when you’re physically excluded. If you don’t have access to public transportation, you often don’t have access to health care, employment, or education. You don’t have access to opportunities.

And that’s why we’re looking to extend the Tap-and-Ride experience from the first to the last mile. When we apply the open loop to other means of transportation, there is a cascading effect. We’re committed to making it easier for people to move around a city, no matter where they live or need to be. We are seeing a positive impact on sustainability and an increasing number of people leading active lifestyles. We help transit agencies save money and provide a better experience for their riders.

Yet globally, the open loop is the exception rather than the rule: only about one in ten medium-to-large cities have significant transit capacity across their entire transit system .

It is clear that we are at an inflection point. Our center shows that the technology and expertise are in place to make urban mobility simpler and more accessible, however a user chooses to travel, whether by train or bus, scooter or bicycle, or even by car to its destination.

It’s time for the whole world to get involved. Next stop: Amsterdam.