Jun. 7, 2018
Rogue Valley Transportation District (RVTD) is the public transportation provider in Oregon’s Rogue Valley with routes serving Medford, Ashland, Central Point, Talent, Phoenix, White City, and Jacksonville, operating a fleet of more than 30 CNG-fueled buses. RVTD’s fare-collection system was very old and difficult to maintain, causing delays during boarding and frustrating passengers and operators. In 2016, the RVTD Board of Directors decided to update the technology to catch up to the rest of the system.
RVTD first implemented the TouchPass electronic fare payment system from Delerrok Inc. TouchPass makes it easy for RVTD passengers to purchase fares online or on a mobile app, but RVTD needed to ensure that they offered RVTD passengers who prefer to pay with cash the best possible solution as well. Paige West, RVTD Senior Planner, said, “The typical fare collection and payment system solutions didn’t fit our needs, so we crafted an RFP that included options for integration with the TouchPass system, but focused on our cash collection and processing needs.
RVTD’s Associate Planner and Project Manager for the project, Jon Sullivan, said the LECIP solution rose to the top. “LECIP approached our challenges the same way we did and maintained a cost structure that worked within our budget.
Juno Okano, LECIP Project Manager, said that LECIP knew that one of the RVTD's biggest needs was to get comprehensive and accurate data from the farebox and cash system. “LECIP is able to meet that need through our high-speed validating farebox and reconciliation capabilities between the counted cash and reported logs,” said Okano. “A major success was the completion of the project within the original schedule. Thanks to a very cooperative and hands-on customer team [at RVTD], software customization work and installation went a lot smoother than even we expected.”
LECIP’s standard ticket printing system eliminated the need for Operators to cut transfers. Now, Operators simply push the “print transfer” button on the LECIP unit and the date, day code, and expiration time are all included in plain text for the accepting Operator to see.
According to Sullivan, LECIP and Delerrok also created a unique QR transfer ticket feature where all the time and date information is still printed, but the ticket also includes a QR code containing the same information in a format that can be scanned by the passenger on the TouchPass Reader. “Transfer cutting and inspection was costing us valuable time along our busier routes,” said Sullivan. “Dwell time accounted for approximately one-third of our revenue service time, but now our average fare collection time has been improved significantly by deploying the LECIP QR ticket feature.”
According to Sullivan. “Our passengers have embraced the new fare systems and we know that it is easier to ride our buses than ever before.”
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