Denver's RTD, Transit, and Masabi team to launch in-app ticketing

More than 35,000 people who use Transit every month across the Denver metro area will now be able to purchase and activate Regional Transportation District (RTD) tickets within the company’s mobile app. The launch has been made possible through an integration with Masabi’s Justride mobile ticketing SDK and places the region’s riders among the first in the world to plan and pay for trips involving multiple modes of transportation on a single platform.

The launch of Transit marks the third application — all of which are supported by Masabi — through which RTD riders can conveniently purchase tickets using their smartphones, making it even more convenient to discover and board RTD services. The transit agency’s popular Mobile Tickets app launched in the fall of 2017, and RTD began selling transit tickets within the Uber app in May 2019. RTD remains the only transit agency in the world offering riders the ability to plan trips in real-time and pay for them through Uber.

In the last month, Transit has been downloaded 10,000 times and opened 1.6 million times in Denver, with 15% of its users being from outside the region. Transit provides a single platform for users to access real-time, unbiased trip planning information spanning multiple public and private operators. Travelers in Denver can plan multimodal trips that combine transit, bike-share, and scooters, as well as pay for multimodal trips using Uber and Lyft within the app. With the debut of integrated ticketing, riders can pay for RTD where they’re already planning trips and tracking rides.

RTD, along with other systems that offer ticketing in Transit, form the core of Transit accounts. This new feature — also announced — allows Transit users to enter their payment information once to purchase transit and bike-share passes from a broad range of operators in cities across North America, including Citi Bike in New York; Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C.; Bike Share Toronto; Divvy in Chicago; and BIXI in Montreal.

Mobile ticketing through Transit was first introduced earlier this year in Ontario, Canada, through St. Catharines Transit Commission. Ticketing in St. Catharines was an instant hit, with riders there purchasing more than 1,200 tickets in the first 10 days. After three months, passengers were activating more than 900 tickets each day with Transit. A consortium of transit systems across Ohio gained access in June, and additional transit agencies — including the RTC in Southern Nevada, Dayton RTA, and all three systems covering metro Cincinnati — will launch ticketing with Transit this fall.