Transit Protocol and What We Do
By: Michael Tan
Tags: Blockchain Application, Transportation, Multimodal, Mass Transit, Smart Transportation

Multimodal Travel with Transit Protocol

There are over 4 billion people living in urban cities globally today. The urban population is projected to grow to 6.419 billion by the year 2050 and 1.5 million people are added to the global urban population every week. And all these urban people need to commute to work or study everyday. That’s over 265 billions trips made in a year!

Getting around is annoying though, as there are multiple applications for each and every service… Large companies have been built in the US and Europe for navigation services. But commuters are still facing challenges everyday commuting, from unreliable arrival times to having to search and pay for each individual mode of transport to having no insight of the journey status and multimodal connecting information.

Transportation is a two-sided marketplace, and on the flip side of commuter are the various transport operators and mobility service providers. These transport operators, especially those owned by city governments want to provide better service to their customers (the commuters) but are hamstrung by various challenges. These challenges ranges from lack of investments to talent acquisitions and the lack of operational efficiencies resulting from technology laggard issues.

So if you were to design something smarter, what would it look like? Get to where you want on time without having to worry about buying a ticket, what mode of transport to take and or worst still getting lost…

TransitLink is transforming mass transit to provide urban commuters with a seamless commuting experience everyday, bringing every mode of transport together into one single app that integrates transport options from different providers (such as buses and train), and handling the full experience from journey planning to payments and dynamic journey adjustments.

This could not be done 5 years ago as customer expectations were low. But a perfect storm of critical success factors is fuelling the rise of mobility services now. Internet giants like Uber, Didi and Tencent have trained consumers to expect better service. Digital payment companies like Alipay and WeChat Pay have also made it easier for consumers to use their phones to pay and collect money. At the same time, many governments have embraced technology in a huge manner and made smart city initiatives a priority. Millions of dollars of grants and incentives were given out to make smart cities a reality.

TransitLink was founded in May 2017 to provide payment solutions to the mass transit industry. We work with city transport companies in China to put in place the infrastructure to accept QR code and contactless payment on buses and metro stations. We help to transform these city transport companies and adopt internet technologies and strategies to serve commuters better, while allowing users of Alipay, WeChat Pay, Unionpay and the like to pay bus or metro fares with their mobile wallets.

The company has signed more than 150 cities in China as of end Q1 2019 for exclusive partnership rights to install and operate their mobile payment infrastructure on buses and metro stations, covering a population base of over 120 million people. 40 cities have been launched at the end of Q1 2019. The rest of the cities are due to launch throughout the year.

Transitlink is forecasted to sign exclusive agreements with over 400 city transport operators in 2019, bringing the total to almost 500 cities under the TransitLink ecosystem and serving a population base of more than 260 million people. Over 82,000 payment terminals will be deployed in buses and metro stations by the end of 2019.

Transit Protocol is the blockchain platform of TransitLink. It is a multi-modal transport protocol built on the blockchain. We provide the common language for the “internet of mobility” and help redefine how people access, pay for and use transport in their everyday lives. This protocol or “set of rules” enables the aggregation of different mobility services into one platform, allowing multiple stakeholders in the mobility ecosystem to interact in a common language and working together to provide awesome service to urban commuters using the Transit Protocol platform.

The commuter is the centre of our universe… We have built a consumer-centric mobile application around a urban person’s daily journey commuting to work or school. The commuter is able to plan, search, book, pay and do many other post-journey tasks in-app. Commuters can now enjoy a frictionless journey and travel seamlessly across all modes of transport with worrying about how to get to destination or where to change transport modes. It’s all taken care of now with the TransitLink mobile application developed by Transit Protocol.

Other than the day to day intra-city travels, commuters in one city can also use the same mobile application and the same user account registered in his/her home city for travels to other parts of the country, or even in other countries. This account roaming service is part of the Transit Protocol service. The same service that the commuter is used to will be made available in the other cities and countries operating within the Transit Protocol platform.

Besides the commuters, the other stakeholders in the Transit Protocol platform can benefit greatly from the platform. City governments can use the traffic data generated from the platform as insights into the actual traffic situation as it happens, and aid in the real-time traffic management and planning for future infrastructure.

The private mobility service providers and public transport operators can now work together on a common platform and not view each other as competitors but partners with a common purpose of serving the customers better. This mindset shift to a multimodal model helps transport operators to redefine itself as “mobility” and focuses on the customer instead of just a product to the customer. This is more so in resolving the first mile and last mile connectivity which has always been a huge pain point amongst commuters.

The world is now ready for some radical changes in the mass transit industry, and commuters are yelling for better service and user experience. The time is now, and Transit Protocol is changing the way we commute in this internet age…