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Commuters should brace for longer lines at the Light Rail Transit-Line 1 (LRT-1) starting next week as the railway transitions to a new ticketing system.
The LRT Authority (LRTA) said the magnetic cards will be phased out to give way to the new “Beep card,” a contactless smart card that can soon be used in all of Metro Manila’s railways.
During the transition phase, passengers of LRT-1 can only enter stations by buying coupons, which will be manually collected by security guards at service gates.
LRTA explained this is because LRT-1 stations are too small to accommodate old and new ticketing machines at the same time.
The beep card is a product of AF Payments, a joint venture between Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) and Ayala Corp., which bagged the automated fare collection system Public-Private Partnership (PPP) contract in 2013.
The private concessionaire has been conducting a limited public testing of the cards in LRT-2 since July 20.
Peter Maher, chief executive of AF Payments, said around 67,000 beep cards were sold during the trial. Single journey ticket holders used their beep cards 460,000 times, and completed 150,000 top-ups.
Maher said the trial was generally a success, but there were some instances where commuters were still clueless on how to use the new system.
“They need to know how to insert the notes. That takes a little bit of practice, they’ll get the hang of this,” he said.
Based on the concessionaire’s contract, the ticketing scheme should be rolled out in all elevated railways–LRT Lines 1 and 2 and the Metro Rail Transit-3. This unified scheme will make transferring from one rail to another easier.
“We’ve learned a lot in LRT-2, now that we’re commissioning our equipment in Line 1, we’re not crossing anything that we haven’t seen before, so it helps us move a little bit faster, so we’re not expecting any software changes,” said Maher. —from a report by Jacque Manabat, ABS-CBN News
Photo: TREN Facebook page
This article has been re-published with permission from ABS-CBNnews.com.
