Did you know that June 20 is National Dump the Pump Day? We did, and we plan on putting our best foot forward to help the American Public Transportati...

In honor of National Transportation Week, we wanted to remind people how much they can save by taking public transportation.  It saves you money, helps the environment and can ease the stress of your daily commute by car.  Here are just a few reasons to take public transportation – and not just this week, but every week.

One of the best things about pilots and early implementations is that they provide us with useful information on real world challenges, traveler behav...

We have been hard at work implementing open payment in cities like London and Chicago, and wanted to share with you how the implementations have been ...

On March 13, I attended the annual “Celebrating Women Who Move the Nation” breakfast, hosted by COMTO in Washington, DC, and chaired by fo...

Of all the modes of public transportation, bus travel can be a frustration for riders.  The systems run off a predetermined schedule, but the tim...

Let’s face it, public transportation projects are expensive.  Even updating old tracks can cost transit agencies billions of dollars. ...

At Cubic’s operations in Sydney, we’re excited that the trials have begun here for the new Opal smart card system which is being designed ...

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson got it right when he said that there was something about a steam train that reduces adult males to bug-eyed adolesc...

In their celebration of the Tube’s 150^th anniversary, the Guardian is putting together a playlist of songs which are loosely about the London Underground.  Ideally, their goal is to feature a song for each of the 270 station stops – and we find that even such unlikely station names as Whetstone are mentioned in songs!  The creativity is wonderful!

The Guardian has created a Spotify playlist where you can listen to the songs that have been added so far.  You can even add your own to the playlist if you think there is one missing. 

As announced last summer, we are very excited and proud to be the lead industry sponsor for the London Underground’s 150^th anniversary celebration this year.  The kickoff will be 9 January which commemorates the first underground journey between Paddington and Farringdon in 1863.

As part of the celebratory events, there will be two special steam train runs this month.  On 13^th and 20^th January the Met Locomotive No. 1 will pull the Metropolitan Railway ‘Jubilee’ carriage No. 353 and the Chesham set of coaches to celebrate the inaugural public passenger underground journey. 

With 2012 in the books, it’s the time of year when many of us look back and reflect on the experiences and achievements of the past twelve months.

For Cubic, 2012 stands out as one in which we have garnered accolades from our industry peers, with the common theme being one of exceptional service delivery.

Today saw the publication in London of Her Majesty the Queen's traditional New Year’s Honours List for 2013.  We extend our heartfelt congr...

We are very excited to announce that the world’s largest open payment system for transportation is now live! This is the first major step in our ambitious project to enable London’s entire transportation network to accept payment via contactless credit and debit cards. 

One piece of our Nextcity vision is the ability to pay for all modes of transportation with one form of media.  This includes paying for train, ferry and bus fare, parking, tolls and even bike and car shares.  There are some cities that are taking steps in the right direction to make payment integration seamless between modes. 

Hurricane Sandy ripped through the northeast last week, leaving a path of destruction in her wake.  Fifty million Americans have been affected by Sandy, including many of our employees, their families, as well as our customers and suppliers and their families.  Our hearts and support go out to all those who have been impacted.

We are very excited to announce that our “Nextcity – Making the Vision of Intelligent Travel a Reality” video has won the ITS World Congress 2012 video competition! The competition results were announced on October 26^th at the closing ceremony of the ITS World Congress in Vienna, where the global ITS community had come together to discuss the latest trends and policies in Intelligent Transportation Systems. 

It is with sadness that we learned of the death of Langley Powell on August 31^st.  He spent much of his transit career in San Diego where Cubic Transportation Systems is headquartered, so his accomplishments resonate on a professional – and personal – level.

In 1980, when most transit systems had abandoned the idea of using trolleys for light rail transit, Langley Powell began running the San Diego Trolley and saw quick success.  The San Diego Trolley, which back then ran from downtown San Diego to the border, now runs over three rail lines and 53.5 miles to transport over 32 million passengers every year.  

This is the third in a series of three posts of a questionnaire with Min Wei, CFO of Cubic Transportation Systems, following his bylined article in Mass Transit Magazine, “What are Some Tips for Successful Public-Private Partnerships?”

Budget shortfalls, shrinking traditional funding sources, aging and under-capacity infrastructure and other challenges are leading more transit operators to form Public Private Partnerships (PPP or P3) with the private sector to achieve sustainability and growth.   Here is what you should expect in a P3 and some best practices, drawn from Cubic Transportation Systems’ more than 20 years of P3 experience working with leading financial advisors and banks to construct, deliver and service some of the largest projects in the automated fare collection (AFC) industry. 

This is the second in a series of three posts of a questionnaire with Min Wei, CFO of Cubic Transportation Systems, following his bylined article in Mass Transit Magazine, “What are Some Tips for Successful Public-Private Partnerships?”

This is the first in a series of three posts of a questionnaire with Min Wei, CFO of Cubic Transportation Systems, following his bylined article in Mass Transit Magazine, “What are Some Tips for Successful Public-Private Partnerships?”

I am excited to announce that recently I was named to the national leadership of the Conference Of Minority Transportation Officials (COMTO), and have been appointed to its board of directors.  As an active member since 1997, and the chairman of its strategic planning committee, I look forward to serving as a board member of an organization that has played an instrumental role in my 16 plus years in the public transportation industry.

Check out our latest video explaining our Nextcity vision!

We have recently begun a collaborative research partnershipwith the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, SanDiego (UC San Diego) to research the next generation of intelligent travel byintegrating new mobile device, wireless communication, social media andanalytics technologies into a city’s transportation system infrastructure.

MasterCard has conducted a survey of over 1,600 Americansabout how paying for transit affected their daily commutes.  Overall the survey found that people find itstressful to pay for transit fares with cash. 65% of commuters who use cash to pay their transit fares worried thatthey did not have enough money to pay for their fare, 44% worry about needingcorrect change, and 36% have been unable to ride mass transit because they didnot have enough money for the fare.

Nextcity is Cubic’s vision for the future of transport technology.  The goal for Nextcity is an integrated, multi-modal urban travel payment and information platform. 

Nextcity envisions a more efficient way of regulating, planning and informing all modes of travel within a given region, by mining and using payment and information data to educate and manage travelers’ choices through the provision of integrated real-time information and dynamic pricing. 

On July 6^th, I was lucky enough to be present at the White House ceremony where President Obama signed legislation that accomplishes the important goal of rebuilding America's infrastructure and keeping thousands of workers on the job.

Convenience, accessibility and diversity are the key words for transportation fare collection in 2012.  Momentum is building toward transit operators allowing riders to pay with contactless debit and credit cards as well as mobile phones for their transit fares.  

The progression of transit ticketing systems into open payment systems is primarily being driven by the introduction and widespread adoption of contactless debit and credit cards as well as new programs designed for processing low-value transactions.

With the expanding integration of near field communication (NFC) technology into mobile devices, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that recent research estimates half a billion people will be using mobile devices as travel tickets by 2015. It is only recently that banks and cell phone providers have begun to open up to NFC for making mobile payments and other uses. 

Welcome to our blog! Starting today, we will add a few new posts each week on a variety of topics, including payment and information systems, fare collection, contactless/mobile payment, and other new trends in the industry.  We want to hear from the people who read our blog, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments section of our posts and we will try and respond to every question either in the comments or through a blog post. 

If you would like to keep up with our blog, I suggest you follow us on twitter at @CubicTS or like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/CubicTransportationSystems where we will post links to our latest blog posts as well as transportation stats, interesting information, weekly Art of Transit photos and other news from Cubic.  We look forward to hearing your feedback as well as any topics you would like to see covered.

The PATCO Wave & Pay Card open payment program which began on September 26, 2011, has finished Phase One, marking a watershed in the way in which consumers are able to use the same all-contactless transit payment card for both transit payments and retail purchases.  

During Phase One of the pilot, PATCO riders could pay for all of their PATCO fares and parking expenses with the PATCO Wave & Pay ANYWHERE Visa® Prepaid Card.  They also could use the same card for retail purchases – for example, to buy a snack at a convenience store or pick up dinner at the super market on the way home from work. 

As summer arrives, Cubic’s leadership in open payment systems for revenue management is blossoming with the introduction of Nextaccount, the first of several new products in Cubic’s solution systems portfolio for the next generation of fully integrated Automated Fare Collection (AFC) systems. 

The transit industry is on the verge of a transformation, and Nextaccount creates the ability for transit agencies to continue to reduce their cost of fare collection while improving the traveler and customer experience.