Valladolid City Council (Ayuntamiento de Valladolid) has signed an agreement with Santander España Merchant Services (SEMS), the electronic-payment-managing subsidiary of Banco Santander, and with GMV to set up a fare-digitalizing pilot scheme for two of Valladolid’s main bus lines.

Under this pilot scheme the company called Autobuses Urbanos de Valladolid S.A. (AUVASA for short) and Valladolid City Council will set up a one-year cashless and contactless fare-payment system on lines 1 and 2 to see how this technology works on Valladolid’s bus network. Passengers boarding the buses will be able to pay a single-journey fare by passing their bankcard through a second validator to be fitted on the buses running on these lines. This new validator will be identified with logos of the enabled fare-payment cards. The scheme will collect information on how the system works before it is extended over the whole network.

SEMS will be responsible for providing the single-fare payment network and also for processing these transactions by means of Redsys’s security-guaranteeing fare-payment gateway called “Transys”.

GMV will be supplying 21 next-generation card readers to work alongside the existing ticket-processing units. The pilot scheme will be conducted on AUVASA’s bus lines 1 and 2, made available for this trial, while AUVASA will also be providing technical support for commissioning, fitting and running the scheme.

In the future this scheme, in combination with Valladolid’s Municipal Services Card (Tarjeta de Servicios Municipales), will enable combined fare payments and post payments. Passengers will thus be able to benefit from combined fares between the city’s various services, paying with their citizen card, bankcard or handheld, the system at the end of the day calculating and applying the most favorable fare in each case.

The agreement was rubber stamped on 10 December by AUVASA’s manager, Álvaro Hernández Heredia, SEMS’s General Manager, Rubén Justel Miranda and GMV’s General Manager of Intelligent Transportation Systems, Miguel Ángel Martínez Olagüe.

This groundbreaking system has already been set up in cities like London, Paris or, more recently, in Madrid.