Mobile ticket validators are coming to Calgary LRT stations, but before that happens, councillors have to make a bylaw tweak allowing them.

A technical amendment to the Transit Bylaw, coming to the May 8 Community Development Committee, will allow bylaw compliance for mobile fares with the introduction of validators on CTrain station platforms. It was approved unanimously at committee and will now go to a full meeting of council.

According to the admin cover report, once the platform validators are introduced at all CTrain stations, the mobile ticket will have to be scanned at a validator upon boarding a bus or entering a Restricted Fare Area on the platforms.

“The City’s Law Department has determined that the current bylaw’s language lacks the clarity necessary for legal enforcement,” the city admin report read.

“The current bylaw was created before the introduction of validator technology and a technical amendment is required to support the new mobile ticketing process.”

Aaron Coon, manager of transit service support at Calgary Transit, said that with the buses already having ticket validators, this allowed them to align the compliance.

“This was an opportunity for Calgary Transit to really look at how our customers interact with our fare products, and looking at creating some consistencies between our customers accessing buses, which is a different process than our LRT,” he told reporters.

Coon said that once the bylaw was approved at council, Calgary Transit customers would begin seeing the validators at the stations. Calgary Transit said it’s part of a $1.8 million capital project that includes the hardware and installation, the software and upgrades, along with an education and awareness campaign.

Ward 8 Coun. Courtney Walcott said that this was a simple change to ensure that the legislation kept up with the available technology. He said that people who have travelled all over the world know that this kind of system is nothing new.

“This is not new technology at all, just new to us,” he said.

“The big change is, as technology shifts, you always find out that the language in your bylaw was specific to a technology of the past.”

Calgary Transit already uses ticket validators on buses. They also have the old-school punch validators attached to vending machines for paper tickets.

Mobile fare discussions on Calgary Transit have gone back more than seven years.

The wait-and-see rider

Jakob Fushtey with Calgary Transit Riders, a city transit advocacy group, believes adding the validators is a good idea.

He said that one of the things they see is people purchasing mobile tickets, and then once they board, riders hold their thumbs over the ticket validation button on their smartphones in case they see someone checking tickets.

“That can make fare enforcement kind of difficult, and that leads to subjective calls by the peace officers when a rider got on the train, or the rider says they activated their ticket just after they got on the train, not because they just saw a peace officer on their car doing fair checks, at least like awkward scenarios like that,” he said.

“By putting the validators at the LRT stations, that’s going to make it easier for riders to show peace officers that they activated their tickets at the start of their trips.”

He said they see it as another tool in the toolbox for fare evasion.

Coon said that they couldn’t estimate how much money had been lost by passengers buying tickets and riding without validating.

“Right now we currently see around 46% of our single-use tickets that are purchased right now electronically are activated, but they aren’t validated, which means that they are activated for seven days before they expire,” he said.

“This will align so that once the customer activates that fare, they’ll validate the fare and then access the transit system within the 90-minute current process that’s available for a valid fare.”

In the past, some councillors have suggested the introduction of fare gates at city LRT stations to reduce the number folks on platforms who haven’t paid for a ticket. Ward 13 Coun. Dan McLean had pushed for a fare gate pilot project at some Calgary stations. City admin said that would cost at least $284 million.

Fushtey believed this was a much lower-cost solution.

“I do think this is the more fiscally responsible choice, versus putting up gates at every LRT station, because estimates on building those out have been in the hundreds of millions,” he said.

Coun. Walcott also said that fare gates were meant to keep people out, not just prevent fare evaders.

“Fare gates are absolutely about keeping people off our systems, about making sure that our system is not open and accessible in all of these scenarios,” he said.

“The whole conversation came up from a safety perspective. So, it was never really about validating tickets. This is just about validating tickets.”