Goodbye to cardboard cards with magnetic stripes on public transport. The main integrated titles of the Autoritat del Transport Metropolità (ATM), including the two most popular, T-Casual and T-Usual, will stop being sold on this medium before the end of the year. They will be replaced by T-Mobilitat in a version also made of cardboard but harder that will be validated by contact, will not require prior registration of the traveler in the system, will be obtained like the current ones, in self-sale machines, and will be rechargeable.
The exact date of the change, which will be automatic, has not yet been set. On the same day, the old cards will stop being issued and the new ones will be available. The cardboard ones that are in circulation may continue to be used until their trips or the validity period end. The decision on the day on which the replacement will be carried out depends above all on logistical aspects, such as the supply of the vending reels, and will be communicated soon. Even so, the ATM launches the information campaign, Pronto, only with T-Mobilitat, starting this Friday, to prepare users.
This new hard cardboard card will have an acquisition cost of 0.5 euros and will be loaded with the desired title. For T-Casual, T-Familiar and T-Grup it will be completely anonymous. On the other hand, for the T-Usual, the DNI number or passport will have to be provided for its purchase, so it will have a different model. This new T-Mobilitat will have a mainly white background and the letters in green, the opposite of the plastic T-Mobilitat, which is green and with the inscriptions in white. The T-16, the T-Jove are already used exclusively with the latter.
Unlike the personalized T-Mobilitat that already works and costs 4.5 euros in the plastic version and 1 euro in the mobile version, the one that is going to be put into circulation does not allow you to use the balance of pending trips in another of new issue in case of loss or theft. For this reason, those responsible for the ATM hope that the most intensive users, those of the T-Usual, will go directly to the personalized one. Those who until now choose cardboard do so as a matter of habit, according to surveys that have been carried out.
The general director of the ATM, Pere Torres, explained this Thursday that this new version of the T-Mobilitat “is not an intermediate step” between magnetic cardboard titles and the plastic card. “It was always planned to ensure that sporadic travelers who are not registered when they arrive at a station can travel,” he recalled. This format, although with special characteristics, has already been used successfully in the last edition of the Mobile World Congress, which resulted in 155,000 validations by 24,000 users, and in the International Union of Public Transport (UITP) meeting, with 16,000 validations from 2,000 users.
T-Mobilitat currently concentrates about 40% of the validations of the ATM integrated system, around one million on working days. Torres predicted that with the step that will be taken “it will quickly rise to 60, 70 or 80%.” Before the arrival of the new cards, keep moving forward. So far in September it has had 26,000 discharges.
Single tickets will remain in the cardboard format with a magnetic stripe, which as they are not integrated can only be used in one operator, and other minority cards such as T-Dia, T-Usual for unemployed people, T-Verda and the T-Aire, the latter for days with episodes of nitrogen oxide pollution that until now has never been activated. The ATM’s forecast is to incorporate these titles into T-Mobilitat throughout 2024, as well as to be able to use Apple mobile phones in the validators (now it is only possible with Android devices that have NFC).
