Ready2Ride app? QR code-based tickets? Here’s how tech could make your Pittsburgh commute easier

Pittsburgh public transportation frequenters will have tech-friendly options while keeping the door open to traditional payment methods, thanks to changes to Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s payment app.

The transportation agency’s leaders want to provide its riders with more options for how they pay their fare. The latest method they’ve chosen is its 2021-launched Ready2Ride mobile app that enables riders to use their phones to pay on buses, and on Sept. 1, it expanded to enable use on the Pittsburgh Light Rail train system.

The reason? Connect cards get lost and quarters can sink to the bottom of purses and be out of reach. More often than not, Pittsburgh Regional Transit Chief Innovation Officer Jeffrey Devlin said, most riders will have their phones within their reach.

“We recognized that people pretty much always have their phones on,” said Devlin, who has been with the agency for five years and oversees its Innovation Services teams. “If we can provide an option to make it easier for folks to buy a ticket, pay their fare, using their phone, then that is a natural means for us to provide for our riders. So it was all about catering options and making it easy for our riders to navigate our system.”

The free app, which is available in both the Apple App or Google Play stores, was soft-launched to be used only on buses in 2021, however, Devlin said it was actually a decade in the making. After Pittsburgh Regional Transit put out a request for proposals in 2018, a London-based firm called Masabi ultimately won the bid. It took three to five years for development to be ready for Pittsburgh riders’ phones. (A rep for the firm was unavailable to comment on how many technologists put labor into the app, and the platform’s tech stack.)

Pittsburgh Regional Transit is open to commissioning new features to the app as time goes by. Current features include the ability to purchase tickets, choose a ticket type, pay with a credit or debit card, and scan the app when boarding the bus or train. Since its launch, Devlin said of Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s 120,000 rides per day, 15% of its ridership has been using the app.

“We’re absolutely looking at how we build out the growth and the opportunities of using the app,” Devlin said.

The CIO added that if you don’t have a phone, you can use a printed ticket, which is QR code-based. So while it’s called mobile-based ticketing, Devlin said, the technology provides many opportunities for riders.

The agency’s leadership reports mostly positive feedback from users.

“It’s just another tool that we are providing to our riders, it’s not replacing anything. There are still many other options for our riders to pay their fares and even more than what folks are used to on the way,” Pittsburgh Regional Transit Director of Public Relations Adam Brandolph said. This is … an attempt to both bring people into the future, but not leave anyone behind.”

Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.