It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a town with a good budget, must be in want of investments.

Smaller is better

One could argue that a pass like uRide could be implemented in any city of the world. While this stands true, however uRide has features that make it look like a mobile money system. The secondary chip of the card is a nano computer, with a battery, CPU, RAM and even a small screen. It has been decided that uRide will reduce the use of physical money and/or credit cards to a minimum. There are several criteria that must be always satisfied, in order to have a reasonable adoption:

safety of the operation
absence of transactoin fees
simplicity of use
universality

coin-utopia

Security

By the end of an operation, a certain amount of money has moved from one device to another. No money is created, nor lost during the transaction. This is the basic need and it triggers the next condition.

No fees

While banks love fees and commissions, both of them have led to the failure of the electronic purse system. It is better to pay in cash with no fees than to do the same and lose something. People perceive the commissions as something negative and for good reason. There is one exception: when every party in the ecosystem takes a fee for an operation.

uRide-traditional-wallet

Easy to use

The massive spread of smartcards in the world is most likely due to the ease of use. Just imagine that you have to pay $7,38 five times a day every day. What comes after the comma is a nightmare. Not at all simple. Just this and the card saves the day.

Massive adoption

The last condition is about the general acceptance. Having only a credit card in the center of the Gobi desert is not the best option, unless every local carryes a payment terminal. The opposite is let’s say Amsterdam. You can pay with a credit card everywhere.

Mobile money

The uRide pass is an electronic purse. One can charge on it a small amount of money. The Utopian law forbids the commissions and fees when using uRide as money. The payments can occur for every price beteen the smallest possible price (1 cent) up to the 100 Utopian coins. It is like a credit card, only there is no 16 digit number.

Money transactions

What makes uRide interesting is the flexibility it offers. One uRide card can transfer to another uRide card:

money
ride tickets
ride passes

For example, if a group of tourists want to ride with UPITA, there is no need to buy as many uRide cards as the people in the group. The card can store up to 30 (!) different passes and even more, can do group validations. Much faster than repeating the process so many times .In fact this feature has been requested in order to allow the buses keep up with the time schedules.

For security reasons, the transfers can only be made at the UPITA ticket dispenser machines. That’s why they have two uRide slots.

Other transactions

uRide has another feature. It can store tickets for events:

museum visits
sport matches

By avoiding the paper tickets as much as possible, Upita is really making progress towards being a zero paper community, like a certain country from Europe. The small screen can display specific information like the amount of money left on the card, or the currently transit pass, or even the picture of the owner.

Card security

The idea behind uRide is to secure the card. While mobile apps are cnsidered secure by many, they operate on physical devices that have been compromised in the past. Only a physical device with no electrical contact can guarantee very a good security level. While this is not sufficient by itself, it is a mandatory condition.

Etiquetas » Massive-adoption

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