SF's Transit System Offers Commuters Fast Access to Subways and Sandwiches

"We're always looking for new and innovative ways to enhance our guests' dining experience, and providing a variety of payment options is a convenience that our guests appreciate and want," says Michael Verdesca, division VP of systems development for Jack in the Box. "As RFID payment technology becomes more prevalent, Jack in the Box's experience in this trial will help us be well-prepared to meet our guests' needs."

According to Fang, an additional smart poster will soon be installed at another station, enabling users to download the trailer of an upcoming feature film onto their test phones.

BART says it spent $350,000 on the project, $250,000 of which was used to implement the program. This included configuring a database to hold participants' account IDs, and linking their user accounts to First Data's payment processing services. The other partners in the project, including First Data, ViVOTech, Samsung and NXP Semiconductors, financed their own contributions to the program.

In the future, Fang says, if the NFC trial goes as planned and receives positive feedback from the participants, BART could be joined by transit systems in other cities, such as Los Angeles or Chicago, in supporting the NFC technology by establishing accounts that consumers could use to access transit systems in different cities using their NFC phones.

Before this can happen, however, cellular carriers will need to make NFC handsets widely available. Samsung is not yet selling the NFC handset to the public, but Nokia offers an NFC-enabled model in the United States and in Europe. In Asia, RFID-enabled cell phones are widely used for making retail and transit purchases.