I wrote before about how it was fairly painless to get around Vancouver by bus thanks to their Compass card system, and when I went to visit my mom, I discovered that Edmonton is doing something very similar with their Arc card system. The weather here lately has made using the ticket machines a bit tricky though, so I finally looked into Calgary’s system, and it…went a different path.
In Calgary’s system, instead of a physical card, you have to use a smartphone app. In the app, you purchase ‘virtual tickets’ ahead of time, and then just before you get on the bus or train, you have to ‘activate’ a ticket in the app. If you’re getting on a bus, you then have to show the QR code the app displays to a scanner on the bus. This is…a bit less convenient than just tapping a card.
You also can’t just load up on a bunch of tickets or put $x into it ahead of time. The virtual tickets expire after only 7 days if you haven’t used them, and you can only buy 5 at a time, so you’re likely going to have to make purchases of them on a regular basis. This then becomes yet another app that wants to hold on to your credit card details for your convenience. (It’s supposed to integrate with ApplePay too, but I’ve had separate troubles getting that working.)
It works, but it’s not great. I guess after several aborted attempts to come up with their own homegrown system, Calgary Transit just gave up and went “look, we’ll just use…those guys” and picked a service already operating in some other cities.