In less than two months, SEPTA will make a move toward the future.
Starting June 13th, the transit service will sell 10,000 SEPTA Key Cards on a first come, first served in kiosks at 12 subway stations, including Dilworth Plaza and Cecil B. Moore.
“You have that one card that can do everything you need to do. It can pay for your fares,” said SEPTA Spokesman Andrew Busch.
“You can also use it to pay for your lunch, pay for your coffee. Whatever you need during the course of the day.”
The cards have chip technology, allowing subway, bus and trolley riders to reload using cash and credit as kiosks.
“The features of it are limited compared to what it’s eventually going to be able to do,” said Busch.
“We think that they’re (the passengers are) going to give us some valuable feedback on how it’s working, how their transactions are working.”
Vanessa Chandler is a freshman at Temple. She takes SEPTA periodically but says she welcomes a new payment system. “It would just make everything easier not having to carry on the tokens and like always going to 7/11 or the student store to buy more tokens,” she said.
Another commuter, Julie Stapleton Carroll said a change is much-needed.
“It’s a long-time coming, and it should have happened a long time ago. The Metro in DC has had it.”
But the system has been anticipated for a long time, as some Key card kiosks have been sitting vacant at stations since the program’s 2013 projected launch. Busch said although there has been a long wait, SEPTA wanted to take time to work out major flaws.
“Situations where it’s gone quickly or it’s been phased in all at once, or a quick phase in have not gone very smoothly,” he said. “We wanted to avoid those kinds of problems for our riders.”
More information on SEPTA Key can be found here.
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