The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced that it will partner with GlobeSherpa to pilot a new mobile ticketing application using the GlobeSherpa platform. The pilot is expected to begin in the summer of 2015 and will allow riders in the SF area to purchase, store, and use single or multiple Muni fares on one mobile device, purchase tickets for cable car rides, and purchase one-day, three-day, and seven-day passports. With more than 707,459 weekly boardings on average, The San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) is the primary public transit system in the Bay Area and is the seventh-largest transit system in the United States.
This partnership with SFMTA is another significant step forward for GlobeSherpa bringing our customer base to 9 transit agencies in the U.S. with 4 systems on the West Coast, 3 in the Midwest, 1 in the Southwest, and one on the East Coast. This partnership comes at a strategic moment when mobile ticketing is quickly reaching an inflection point. According to Juniper Research, there is a “Pent-Up Demand” for mobile ticketing solutions, especially in the transit sector. We have seen this clearly in Portland with TriMet where the TriMet Tickets app has been downloaded more than 180,000 times by riders resulting in the purchase of more than 3 million tickets since launch in September of 2013.
Today, more than 32% of San Francisco residents use public transportation in daily commuting to work, ranking the city first on the West Coast for ridership and third overall in the United States. The city is also home to a large number of corporations and start-ups and a hub for technology and innovation and as a result, we expect significant excitement and adoption of our technology.
On the tech side, contactless smartphone ticketing, NFC mobile payments, and technologies that employ Bluetooth Low Energy to provide important and relevant information to riders are playing an increasingly important (if not disruptive) role in mobile ticketing and mobile payments more broadly and GlobeSherpa is well positioned to provide this functionality to all Bay Area riders.
