The first week of July would begin the implementation of the new electronic collection in public bus transport in the city of Chillán. This was confirmed by the Ñuble Transport Seremi, Javier Isla, who explained that the start would be contemplated for July 3 and would extend for six months in its white march, leaving the normal collection through cash for all of 2023. . The objective of this implementation is to be able to gradually withdraw the use of cash as a means of payment on board the buses of the commune.
Chillán will become the first regional capital outside Santiago in which this new system will be implemented. In the first instance, the form of payment will be through prepaid cards and from the mobile application, which will be available for download in the different operating systems for smartphones. In this regard, the SEREMI confirmed that “this system would start working the first week of July. The validators have already arrived in Chile and the installation process has begun in the different buses. We have July 3 as the tentative date. We are going to be in white gear for six months, so we are not going to eliminate the coins throughout this year, at least, this with the aim of detecting failures in the system or complications that have not been foreseen before and an endless number of things that can happen. These six months are going to allow the city to get used to it”.
Payment method
Physical cards will be the main means of payment for the new system, which will be on sale from June. In this first process, they will be delivered free of charge to older adults, who are the group on which efforts have been focused for the adaptive process. Along these lines, the seremi added that “the ones that we are going to distribute for free are exclusively for the elderly, which is the range that has the greatest economic vulnerability and that is why we want to give them help in this regard. They also have a 50% discount on the public transport rate. In June we are going to start the process of selling regular cards for the general public”.
The value of this new prepaid card will be $2,500 pesos, with two trips included, and it will be available at the 150 charging points distributed in Chillán. These points will begin to work in different businesses and will be easily recognizable by the logo of the Bipay company, which is in charge of this new system.
On the other hand, the second method works through the Bipay app, where you can pay the price of the ticket without contact through a QR code. For this purpose, the code can be generated once the account is charged and at the time of payment, it must be brought closer to the reader and the payment is made. A third method is aimed only at students of basic and higher education, which is done through the National Student Card (TNE), working the same as a prepaid card.
Regarding the charging methods, they can be done physically at the points distributed in Chillán, which will also be announced in June. It can also be done online through the recarga.bipay.cl website, or directly from the app.
Trainings
The trainings will continue to be carried out, even after the start of this implementation, aimed at older adults. Seremi Javier Isla commented that “we have trained close to 3,000 older people and we have had an excellent reception. We thought that we would have a little more resistance to the system due to the sudden change that this means, however it has been extremely good and we will continue to carry out training during the white march process in sectors where we are detecting less adaptation”.
