CURRENT SITUATION AND PROBLEM
Since the early 1960s magnetic stripes have been used on transit tickets.  These magnetic stripe cards are designed to be fed through a swipe channel or a motorized reader/encoder where the ticket is read, rewritten, and verified. 
The last thing that a transit authority wants is a line of people trying to get on a bus or go through a turnstile. Yet magnetic stripes can lose data by contact with magnetic surfaces or become otherwise unreadable from contact with oils or foodstuffs on people’s fingers.  Environmental contamination from being dropped on a floor or held in the rain can also impact cleanliness and performance.  The human or environmental contamination then can interfere with the reader equipment, resulting in unpredictable downtime or high preventative maintenance costs. In addition, while magnetic stripe cards have improved over the past half century, transit authorities still have concerns about the ease of duplicating the data encoded in the stripe and the loss of data from contact with magnetic closures such as those commonly found on handbags. 

RFID TRANSIT CARD SOLUTION
As a result of the limitations in magnetic stripe cards, more and more transit authorities are adopting contactless technologies, specifically radio frequency identification (RFID) cards. RFID cards have the potential to reduce cost, provide an improved commuter experience, and broaden the authority’s stored value, length of trip and time-of-day revenue options.  RFID cards provide authorities with a secure transit card that is the suitable for all fare structures, reads and writes data at high speed, provides contactless ease of use and speed to the passenger, and reduces system maintenance costs. 
Transit authorities see a high return on investment for converting to RFID technology.  While transit authorities’ capital budget often requires extended governmental review, we are now seeing accelerated conversion as demonstration projects have been successful and authorities secure the needed funding from municipalities, independent bonds, etc.

RFID FOR TRANSIT SYSTEMS
Transit system operators’ seek a read distance of two to ten inches (5 to 25 cm).  This read distance is ideally suited to low-cost 13.56MHz (high frequency or “HF”) passive RFID technology.  HF RFID tags are loop structures and can be manufactured by either an etching process or printing.  For limited use disposable transit tickets, an etched tag is a three layer sandwich while a printed tag can be two or three layers.  High speed printing of the RFID antenna coupled with integrated graphics printing result in lower cost tickets using printing technologies. 

VALUE TO THE PRINTER
Printers have held the vast majority of the transit ticket business for fifty years.  Until recently, RFID transit tickets were viewed as high cost and required outsourcing of an etched polymer film circuit to be inserted into the ticket. This eroded operating margins and allowed others to share in the printer’s market.
Parelec’s Parmod® VLT conductive silver inks again give the transit ticket printer the tools he needs to capture this growing market opportunity, eliminate the etched inlay and increase margins from the levels of traditional magnetic stripe printing.
Parelec’s patented Parmod® VLT inks utilize conductive metal (silver) more efficiently than any other conductive inks on low-cost substrates.  Parmod® VLT inks provide:

1. Two to three times less ink due to higher conductivity
2. Suitable for high speed processes such as rotary screen or flexography.
3. Passive RFID ticket provides unlimited useful life
4. Equivalent to etched antenna performance in this application
5. Lower cost ink consumption
6. Cost of ~ $0.15-20 depending upon volume and chip technology

PARELEC’S CERTIFIED PARTNER PROGRAM
This exclusive international program was designed by Parelec and is available to select printers who have adopted Parelec’s quality and performance criteria.  The Program embraces printers, IC vendors, antenna designers, adhesive suppliers, equipment vendors, chip manufacturers and service providers who provide turnkey processes demonstrated to leverage the Parmod® value proposition.  With training, equipment selection and validation, and state of the art knowledge in HF printing, Parelec can bring its printer partners ‘up-to-speed’ in a proven efficient process.  Parelec’s certified printers have printed over 50 million HF RFID transit tickets to date.   

To learn more about the Certified Partner Program and how Parelec’s Parmod® inks can help you capture or retain your transit business, call your Parelec Technical Representative at +1 609 279-0072 or email us at info@parelec.com