Halifax Transit first started the process to implement electronic fares in 2012 with a transit technology plan. At the time, the $44 million in spending was supposed to “set the groundwork for customer service-related projects such as public interfaces, stop annunciation and a fare management system.” Although in 2018, when the program was audited, the city’s auditor general found—three years after the planned five-year end point—that the program had no end in sight.
Also in 2018, Halifax Transit considered switching to comically large bus tickets. At the time, Halifax Transit’s manager of technical services, Mark Santilli, told CBC’s Information Morning that they were switching to the large tickets to allow for new fare boxes that would eventually be able to accept tap-pay. They had decided not to move ahead with the electronic fare payment app at that time.
Elsewhere in the world, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw transit systems move away from tokens, tickets and cash to payment cards. The first contactless payment card ever used was for buses in Korea in 1995. And since then, most modern Transit systems have been moving to something called open loop payments. This is a payment method whereby users can install an app, or they can just pay directly with their card, watch or phone like they do everywhere else in life, except for on Halifax Transit buses and at garage sales.
The new fare boxes that were first promised in 2018 were cancelled in 2020 with both Transit and Trapeze software pulling out of the agreement. Staff told council they were now going to focus on an electronic fare management system in “an effort to develop a more comprehensive electronic fare-payment program,” reads the report. The same report that came to council in 2020—eight years after Transit started the work of modernizing—advises not to use reloadable plastic cards because of “probable impediments to rapid introduction of new, innovative features and products reflecting the industry’s latest best practices.” Which is funny, in an ironically depressing kind of way.
At that meeting in 2020, Santilli told the committee that the move to the payment app would happen “quickly.”
Then in 2022, Santilli told Information Morning “we hope to have everything signed in the next few weeks. And then after that, it’s a matter of four to six weeks in terms of rollout.”
Now in 2023, when asked about the delays by councillor Waye Mason during August’s transportation standing committee meeting, Halifax Transit boss Dave Reage told the members: “Likely, we’re going to get into the fall before we have this roll out, unfortunately.”
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When The Coast followed up with the city after the meeting to ask for the specific cause of the hold up, a spokesperson wrote back in an email: “There is currently no hold up, everyone involved on the project continues to work through the process of delivering the project as quickly as possible.”
But there is a hold up. There has been a hold up. And there are other things in this story that do not make a lot of sense.
When asked for more details to explain some of these seemingly contradictory statements, a city spokesperson wrote in an email: “I have provided you with all of the information available at this time. Further information on the app will be available in the coming days and weeks when public facing marketing and communications materials are launched.”
Information on how our money is being spent—or, seemingly in this case, squandered—needs to be more than just “public facing marketing and communications materials.” There needs to be accountability. How is it possible that we are cruising into the end of 2023 and Halifax Transit still hasn’t implemented an app when the process to do so began in 2012?
There are answers to the questions being raised by Halifax Transit’s brutal procurement process, but that information will cost $133,490 to make public.
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This article appears in Aug 1-31, 2023.
When a process or service is widely available, it puzzles me that a government has trouble implementing it. Why wouldn’t a government liaise with their counterparts or business and determine a reliable, cost effective alternative. Why reinvent the wheel? If it’s being done well in St John or Charlottetown, let’s use what they’ve learned and get moving.
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