Anyone traveling with the NS from next week will no longer need an OV chip card to check in. A debit card, credit card or mobile phone is sufficient. A big step towards the future, although some buses in the Eindhoven region go just that little bit further. There you only have to sit down and an app takes care of the rest.
How that works? This is all done via the Mobyyou app. You don’t have to hold a pass in front of the scanner, but walk quietly into the bus. The app ensures that you check in and out automatically. All you have to do now is show the driver on your mobile that you can ride along, but that will also disappear in the future.
“It actually works like an elastic band”, founder Jeroen Pietryga once explained. “As soon as you get off, the distance between the bus and the telephone increases, which causes the rubber band to snap. Then the connection is broken and you are automatically checked out.”
At the beginning of last year, the system was tested on bus lines 407 and 408, between Eindhoven Central and the High Tech Campus. Now, almost a year later, Pietryga looks back on that period with pride. “The test was successful and the app can now be used on more and more bus lines.”
“It is now about 70,000 trips per week.”
Travelers can now use Mobyyou on 9 bus lines: lines 400 to 408, all to and from Eindhoven Central. “That is about 70,000 journeys per week in total. And together with the province and transport company Transdev, we want to expand that much further.”
Since the start, a few things have changed. “In the beginning we charged a fixed price of 1 euro per journey. You can now also travel on balance. This means that you pay exactly the same as if you checked in in a different way.”
Young people with a student public transport card can now also use the app. “Transporters in particular like that. In the past, students often did not check in because they were allowed to travel for free. Now that happens automatically and such a bus company at least knows how many people it actually transports.”
“Users like the fact that they don’t have to check out. It’s always a stressful moment.”
But the most positive are the travelers themselves, says Pietryga. “Users think the best thing is that they no longer have to check out. That is always a stressful moment. Especially if you have to catch the next bus or train and a whole row has to go through that scanner.”
However, there are of course also small obstacles that users run into every now and then. “A man recently said that he was blocked. It eventually turned out that he had linked his wife’s account to his account. But our security system is set up in such a way that the name of your account must match your public transport pass.”
The public transport chip card is no longer necessary on buses and trains, but will we be traveling en masse in five years’ time without checking in and out? “I expect even earlier,” Pietryga looks optimistically ahead.
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