The transit system in my home town has always been very busy.  The city is not that big and the bus service is just as quick as getting into your car.

Recently they have been trying to move away from using money to using smart cards.  There was an article in the paper last week that mentioned a local card encoding plant had won the contract to manufacture the new transit cards.

As a result of this change, there have been some other developments as well.  They mentioned that they were developing some SIM applications that would allow you to use your mobile phone as your "bus pass".  Another interesting piece of technology are the chip card readers that they will be selling – you can put your transit card into the card reader and "load" your card with credits to ride the bus right from home.

It will be interesting to see if my children will ever use money to ride the bus – but with the move to money-free rides, chances are they never will.