Three young women jump in the tram without having time to buy a ticket… In Dijon, your bank card is your transport ticket. And thanks to this open-payment solution, you can even get an optimised rate for the day. Now that’s a more accessible shared mobility.
26th April 2018, Dijon (France)
“Once, three girlfriends almost missed the tram while I was on duty. They had no ticket when they jumped in and one of them seemed to feel uncomfortable about that.
Amused, I overheard their conversation:
– Do you have a ticket for me?
– No, I never buy tickets.
– Are you crazy!
– It’s best for the planet. No ticket means less paper and more trees saved.
– You can always get a Divia card!
– I don’t like the way I look on my cards’ picture.
– So, are you saying you never buy tickets? And you never got caught?
– No because when I take the tram, now I pay with my bank card. You should do the same.
– What do you mean?
– My bank card is my ticket, I validate it, just like any transport ticket.
– Well… I didn’t know that was possible. And you pay the regular price?
– Better, after three trips on the same day, it automatically switches to day pass mode, just over €4 to travel all day. Really useful to go shopping all day!
– OK, I’m doing it! Do I just touch the validation machine with my card like that?
– Wait, you have to create an account first, it’s super-fast… There you go.
You know what I thought? That’s what progress looks like: empowering all travelers to use shared mobility, confidence rather than distrust, always offering more ways to get around and meet every lifestyle. More ways, more life… Our motto suits us.”
Anissa O.,
Divia Mobilités Control Officer in Dijon (France)
More about the open-payment in Dijon
Employees at Keolis share the same values: We Imagine, We Care, We Commit. These values promote our approach and the key principles that guide our activities and behaviour.
A pioneer in shared mobility, Keolis strives for continuous innovation, to co-develop customised mobility solutions for each region. That’s why we launched the first open-payment solution for a French transport network. This contactless solution, which allows passengers to pay for and validate their journey directly using their contactless payment card or smartphone, was inaugurated on March 27, 2018 in trams. Since then, open-payment has been progressively deployed across the Divia Mobilités bus network: the deployment of contactless payment on buses has been brought forward to respond to increasing passenger expectations.
Open-Payment: useful and attractive for passengers
If there is one thing you always keep with you – apart from your smartphone – it is your bank card. Open-payment enables passengers to jump on a tram without worrying about buying a ticket before, thus eliminating a step in the passenger journey. This is a huge advantage for daily mobility: adapted to everyone’s needs, more efficient and easier. We all know contactless payment solutions, available on smartphones, but not all banks are partners and it usually requires an app.
The system developed by Divia Mobilités in Dijon counts the daily number of journeys payed with the bank card and applies the most advantageous fare: the minimum price is €1.4, that is the price for one ticket and the maximum price is the 24h-pass or the equivalent of 3 tickets. Besides, passengers can follow their consumption on a dedicated portal at any time.
A first in France
The launch of the open-payment made an impact. “This recognition was well deserved for the teams who worked hard to get there!” said Laurent Verschelde, who was Director of Keolis Dijon Mobilités when the service was launched and who is now Director of France South-East branch at Keolis. It is within the framework of a vast programme of transformation to become a Smart City, that the metropole of Dijon chose to become a pioneer in the development of a more inclusive and shared mobility and thus improve the travelling experience in the city.
Visa, Worldline and Natixis collaborated to put the project together. It was an intense, but very open collaboration. “It is a matter of entrepreneurs and people who have invested in this innovation. Everyone wanted to succeed, to be the first in France,” says Laurent Verschelde. “The trust we have in each other, in the idea and in the project, has kept us going even in times of doubt and difficulty. We did not really have an example or a reference point, so we invented a lot… and put our feet in the passenger’s shoes (Thinking like a passenger), to imagine a fluid and reassuring experience. But we were lucky enough not to face big technical issue, it’s rare on a project of this magnitude and this level of criticality.”
A great success
- More than 400,000 journeys with the open-payment in 2018 in Dijon
- Nearly 65,000 different users of the solution by the end of 2018
