Establish a forum for decision-makers and project managers to come together to receive project updates, work through critical project issues, make decisions, and support successful institutional collaboration in a project involving multiple agencies.

Orlando, Florida's experience with a Field Operational Test (FOT) on using a single smart card for transportation payments at facilities operated by multiple regional agencies.

Date Posted
04/07/2006
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Identifier
2006-L00187

Orlando Regional Alliance for Next Generation Electronic Payment Systems (ORANGES) Evaluation Final Report: Electronic Payment Systems Field Operational Test

Summary Information

In 2000, the US DOT awarded a Field Operational Test (FOT) grant to a group of public sector agencies located in the Orlando region. The project was titled Orlando Regional Alliance for Next Generation Electronic Payment Systems, or ORANGES. The US DOT was interested in identifying and evaluating issues associated with establishing partnerships between public transportation service providers and other transportation agencies, in developing and using multiple-application electronic payment systems that included smart card technology. The FOT requirements were specifically designed to test a payment system that could support a variety of payment applications, at a minimum including transit fare collection, parking payment and electronic toll collection.

As part of the national ITS program, the USDOT requires that each FOT have an independent evaluator. The evaluation is separately funded and has independent goals, objectives, schedules and deliverables. The USDOT evaluations also provide useful feedback to the local FOT participants, as well as other interested transportation stakeholders.

The FOT demonstrated the technical feasibility of implementing a regional smart card with a centralized clearinghouse for multimodal regional transportation payments, where a card issued by any participating agency could be used for payments with (and revalued at) smart card accepting equipment operated by any of the partner agencies.

Lessons Learned

The implementation team for the ORANGES project created a core management steering group that was used to collaborate effectively on a variety of technical and operational issues associated with the FOT. Activities included bi-weekly management committee meetings and quarterly executive management committee meetings. These committees were used to work through various business, operational, and technical issues associated with establishing joint operations to support the FOT.

Agencies participating in the ORANGES demonstration established successful technical and interagency operations with a multimodal electronic payment system. This significant and groundbreaking achievement largely resulted from extensive and ongoing institutional collaboration efforts. Project champions took the initiative for ongoing outreach, which helped maintain support from senior management and foster the required new interagency working relationships.

The Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority (LYNX) and Orange-Orlando County Expressway Authority (OOCEA) with the Parking Bureau demonstrated that diverse and multimodal transportation agencies in a region can work together to establish an operational smart card payment system for regional multimodal transportation using a third party clearinghouse service provider. To accomplish this, agency management needed to work through a variety of issues related to establishing roles/responsibilities and building trust relationships.

This success was accomplished through an ongoing commitment from top management to foster the success of the project, and frequent communications amongst a core management steering group. The ongoing commitment from top management was fostered through frequent briefings from the management steering group. In addition to other on-going communication mechanisms, monthly meetings were conducted for the purpose of coordinating the evaluation activities with the FOT implementation team.

This ORANGES experience suggests the following effective approaches to managing regional initiatives:

  • Ensure that each participating agency has a management champion;
  • Create a forum for project champions to meet regularly;
  • Ensure consistency of participating agency project managers, to promote progress and team cohesiveness;
  • Utilize a standard meeting schedule (weekly/bi-weekly/monthly) to build relationships and clarify roles and responsibilities;
  • Identify and resolve specific collaboration issues with an agreed upon conflict resolution approach; and
  • Inform executive management on project progress and key issues with regular briefings.


Developing a regional smart card payment system is related to the ITS Goal of improving customer satisfaction, through making payments for multimodal travel easier by establishing a regional payment method. Demonstrating this type of collaboration between diverse transportation agencies had a positive impact on this goal.

The overall project was completed behind schedule. The ongoing efforts to build and maintain interagency consensus that were used successfully are not considered a significant cause for the delays.

The participating cardholders generally expressed a positive opinion about the technology, with concerns focusing primarily on the limited scale of deployment. Some cardholders took advantage of the opportunity to use their smart card with more than one mode, which was only possible as a result of the interagency collaboration.

The ORANGES experience demonstrated that establishing a forum for decision-makers and project managers to work together through various technical and operational issues can help drive the success of the project. The success of this collaboration demonstrated that diverse and multimodal transportation agencies in a region can work together to establish an operational smart card payment system. It is anticipated that similar collaboration among multimodal transportation agencies associated with other ITS projects could have similar positive benefits and results.