The 104th annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board was held earlier this month in snowy Washington, DC. TRB is lovingly dubbed the “Super Bowl of Transportation” by many of the 13,000 researchers, practitioners, policymakers, consultants, technologists, and others who come together each year to share best practices and define the new research inquiries that will guide the next year’s research.

As a technology company that makes it easier to pay for other peoples’ transit, Jawnt is proud that our own Director of Product Partnerships, Ruth Miller, was chosen to contribute to this exchange of ideas. She and Amy Martin of Four Nines Technologies were invited to present their original research paper, Landscape Review: Payment Technologies and Employee Commuter Benefits as part of a panel titled “Reducing Barriers to Transit Fare Payments”.

In their research, Ruth and Amy inventoried and analyzed the multiple ways that transit agencies accept fare payment, and the even more various ways that employers and benefit administrators have adapted to make pretax transit benefits usable by employees in those systems. For example, employees in Reno, where mobile ticketing is accepted, would have a very different experience from employees across the state in Las Vegas, where open loop (cEMV) is the standard.

For a summary of these systems and commuter benefit adaptations, download this PDF one-pager, or the full presentation. Contact Jawnt to request a copy of the full report.

The other panelists presented fascinating and innovative research worth further exploration. 

• Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority, Masabi, and Four Nines presented a survey of several processes across the United States for streamlining income-based eligibility for low income transit programs. Philadelphia’s Zero Fare Program, a partner of Jawnt, received a well deserved shout out.
• Researchers from UC Irvine presented their findings on student utilization of LA Metro’s GoPass program.
• Another team of researchers from UC Irvine presented a complex modeling approach they designed, which allows users to test the ridership impacts of fares changes in micromobility and fixed route transit systems.