E-purse transit pass: The potential of public transport smart card system in the Philippines

Public transport in the urban areas in the Philippines, takes several trips everyday with Philippines being the second populated country in the South East Asia. Buses and jeeps accounts for these trips, which people utilizes for their work and living. With greater demand to use public transportation, fare collection payment could be very hassle for both driver and passengers. The main objective of this study was to explore the potential of implementing a smart card system in the Philippines to improve the fare payment matrix in public transport utilities and analyze its impact to hypothetically solve issues on the worsening of traffic problem in urban areas, variability in implementation of fare matrix, and nondiscriminatory request to avail of PWD, student and senior citizen discount. A survey questionnaire was used for data collection and snowball purposive sampling was applied to draw the 300 research participants from several demographic, which includes public utility passengers categorized into four (4) namely regular, student, Person With Disabilities (PWD) and senior citizens; public transport operators and drivers. Quantitative method and deductive approach was used in the process to assess the validity of findings. Participant observation was also conducted to understand the participant's gratification on the benefits that the framework may offer to the people thus resulting to a qualitative research and to understand the correlation of the quantitative findings based from the survey. With the proposed framework, the acceptability of the visualized used of smart card could result to a highly sustainable transport payment system in the country that can help promote faster, convenient, standardized fare payment collection and matrix, gratified and placated passenger experience within the region and positive realization of a cost-effective way of transportation for economical commuters.