PATCO expands ‘wave and pay’ for riders’ convenience

Starting Monday, far more riders on the PATCO high speed line between Philadelphia and South Jersey will be able to pay their fare in a new way.

All credit cards with special chips embedded now will work at the “wave and pay” turnstiles. For the first six months of the new fare collection system, PATCO was only accepting its own cards and VISA contactless cards.

PATCO now will accept all VISA, Mastercard and Discover cards with the chips, says Steve Brunner, vice president of Cubic Transportation Systems, which designed the new fare collection system.

“On the entry device at the fare gate, we do it with a contactless interface and the big reason for that is it’s a lot faster and convenient interface for people to use as they are progressing through a fare-gate.” Brunner said.

Brunner says most cards that will work with the system have a special symbol on the back.

“They have a chip in them and an antenna, a very small little computer chip that is encoded on the magnetic stripe” he said.

If you don’t have the new card, you can still use your conventional card at the PATCO ticket machines.

Eventually, smartphones that have a special circuit will be able to pay PATCO fares with “virtual wallets.”