As part of the agreement, the two companies are currently bidding together on the contract for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Regional Customer Service Center. The WMATA project calls for the establishment and operation of a smart card customer service center and the clearing and settling of smart card transactions across all transit agencies in the Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C. areas. The WMATA project will start a new era of integrated transit in the greater Washington D.C. area, allowing passengers to use a single smart card to pay fares across every major transit system in the region.
ERG built Hong Kong's well-known "Octopus" system. Octopus is the largest smart card payment system for mass transit in the world, with some 8.6 million smart cards issued and over 7.2 million transactions processed each day. ERG is also engaged in the largest smart card contract in the United States to design, build, operate and maintain the TransLink fare payment system in the San Francisco Bay Area. ERG has been awarded contracts for other major smart card fare collection systems in Las Vegas, Toronto, Singapore, Rome, Manchester, Gothenburg, Berlin and several cities in France.
"I believe smart card systems will play a major role in the future of American mass transit," said Denis Brown, vice president, Civil Security and Public Safety, Government Solutions, Northrop Grumman IT. "We have found that ERG provides an impressive capacity for interoperability and scalability across multiple transit systems and millions of passengers. ERG's open architecture was also very important to us because it will integrate new applications, such as identification and security, as these applications are deployed."
The development of open architecture-based smart card fare collection systems is the first step toward integrating transit with other smart card systems, such as those used in security and identification.
"This teaming agreement for the transit market represents a tremendous opportunity for ERG and a major benefit for transit operators throughout the United States," said Mr. Peter Fogarty, Chief Executive of the ERG Group. "Northrop Grumman IT brings an excellent reputation for integrity, strength and know-how in working on major complex government projects. Its deep understanding of smart card technology and how it can be used to improve security, as well as passenger convenience, will be important to our customers as we move ahead. "
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