INIT Seattle (ORCA) Fare Collection Portals

INIT Innovations in Transportation provides intelligent transportation systems for public transit. As a turnkey supplier, INIT develops, produces, installs, and maintains integrated hardware and software solutions for all key tasks of public transit companies.

Over the past 5+ years, Marathon has been a key partner with INIT on implementations of their electronic fare system to agencies across the U.S. The most recent project, “ORCA,” was launched for the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority (Sound Transit) along with 6 regional transit partners. With the number of regional agencies involved, as well as a complex rule set, the ORCA electronic fare system is one of the largest and most advanced implementations.

Marathon developed the fare collection portal for the web that allows real-time account management for the general public as well as for organizations and institutions. Public customers can buy cards, add money and passes to cards, schedule auto-reloads, transfer balances between cards, replace lost or stolen cards, save multiple funding sources, and pay with split payments.  Institutions are able to perform all the same public customer functions for their employees both individually and in bulk. If a customer wants to remain anonymous, they can buy cards or add money and passes to a card without providing any personal details except what is necessary to make the purchase.

The ORCA fare collection portal was built specifically with the user experience in mind, especially for mobile users on the go. The base of the ASP.NET portal solution is the Umbraco content management system (CMS) platform and the front end was developed with HTML, CSS, SASS, and Vue.js. The application integrates with MOBILEvario, INIT’s back-office fare management and processing software.