Swipe to Pay NFC Bus Tickets Trialled in UK – Going Nationwide Next Year

Living in London and owning an annual Oyster Card it’s easy to forget the pain of searching for exact change when hopping on a bus outside the capital. Stagecoach and Everything Everywhere is currently testing out NFC ticketing.

Bus passengers in Cambridge can now use their mobile phone to pay for journeys thanks to the trails running ahead of what is hoped to be a UK-wide roll out.

Everything Everywhere has buddied up with the Stagecoach bus network to enable passengers to purchase tickets on their NFC enabled mobile device before simply tapping their phone on the buses smartcard reader.

If this trial proves successful we could see a nationwide roll out of NFC contactless travel payments for both bus and rail services throughout 2013.

The handsets used for the trial will all need to be NFC enabled, or as Orange calls its Near-Field Communications technology, “Quick Tap” and will be kitted out with an app that makes the phone compatible with Stagecoach buses.

I for one would welcome this as I have been caught out in Sheffield, Leeds, Barnsley and Birmingham so far.