The cashless payment system in public transport in Lviv is being restored. To provide the system with a high-quality Internet connection, the employees of LKP “Lvivavtodor” replace the SIM cards of the operator “Kyivstar” with cards of another operator.
Since the currently available communication capacity of the operator “Kyivstar” is not enough for the normal operation of the system. In particular, as of this morning, the operator has been replaced on 153 vehicles: 60 units of ATP-1, on 65 units of electric transport, on 26 vehicles of the Uspih BP company, one bus each of “Mira and K” and “ATP-14630”. Crews continue to work.
“When we change the SIM cards to another operator, the system finally (for the first time in the last 6 days) gets connected to the Internet, and all the information about payment and validation of the trip, which has been accumulated, starts to be uploaded to the server. Therefore, on these days, passengers will receive notifications about pre-authorization – 1 hryvnia will be “frozen” on the account, as well as about the debit of 15 hryvnias for travel. These are the funds for those trips that were made last week. After all, in fact, all these operations were supposed to take place within the next day after the actual payment of the fare, but since there were problems with communication, this information was accumulated, but the debiting of funds from the bank cards of passengers who paid for the fare without cash did not take place.
The same applies to LeoCards. That is, from those general LeoKarts, which passengers used to make cashless payments this week, travel expenses will also be debited.
Please note that the fare will be debited only if the passenger made a cashless payment during this week and saw a green mark on the validator and heard a single beep. If the passenger could not make the payment by card or phone – saw a red mark on the validator and heard a double beep – these trips were not registered in the cashless payment system, so the passenger will not be charged for them,” Lvivavtodor LKP explained.
Therefore, the system of cashless payment by bank card or device with NFC support has already resumed normal operation in the public transport sector. However, in the rest of public transport, the system may work with interruptions for some time.
“The team works at night and completely reconnects the system, replacing SIM cards. It takes about 15 minutes to replace the card on one vehicle, and it takes about an hour to an hour and a half to download the accumulated mass of information from the on-board system of the bus or trolleybus to the server.
It should be noted that the replacement of the SIM card is carried out gradually. Everything to prevent the situation, so that the unloading of the information accumulated for 6 days in all public transport does not happen at once and does not cause an additional load on the system”, – explains LKP “Lvivavtodor”.
At the same time, due to the updating of on-board systems and the downloading of data from them, drivers of some vehicles may have difficulties with printing tickets when paying in cash. Therefore, in order to record such trips, drivers can issue old-style tickets – that is, not those with QR codes, route number and travel time, which are printed immediately when the passenger pays for the fare, but ordinary tickets, on which there must be a real the cost paid by the passenger is UAH 20. Such situations may occur only until the normal operation of the cashless payment system is fully restored.
As LKP “Lvivavtodor” explained, this does not mean that all drivers will not be able to print tickets on all buses and trams, but they warn that this may happen on some vehicles until the system is restored.
“It is important to emphasize that during the period of restoration and normalization of the normal operation of the cashless fare payment system, the controllers will not issue fines to passengers, but will conduct explanatory work and help pay for the fare,” added the LKP “Lvivavtodor”.
“Therefore, on those vehicles on which SIM cards have already been replaced and data has been downloaded and the ASOP system has been rebooted, passengers will be able to use cashless payment with a bank card or a device with NFC support without any problems, everything will work correctly there. Other public transport may experience disruptions. But specialists of Lvivavtodor are doing everything possible to restore the normal functioning of the cashless fare payment system as quickly as possible,” said Oleg Zabarylo, director of the department of urban mobility and street infrastructure of LMR.