If you’ve ever tried to hop on the bus in San Francisco and were bummed to find that Apple Pay wasn’t an option (unlike in New York, Beijing, and plenty of other major cities): good news! That’s changing. Apple has announced that support for Clipper (the payment system for BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, and a bunch of other Bay Area transit agencies) is officially on the way. You’ll soon be able to just tap your iPhone or Apple Watch to the card reader and be on your way.
Apple says that Apple Pay will work across all 24 agencies where Clipper is accepted, meaning it should play friendly with:
- AC Transit
- BART
- Caltrain
- City Coach
- County Connection
- Dumbarton Express
- FAST
- Golden Gate Ferry
- Golden Gate Transit
- Marin Transit
- Muni
- Petaluma Transit
- SamTrans
- San Francisco Bay Ferry
- Santa Rosa CityBus
- SMART
- SolTrans
- Sonoma County Transit
- Tri Delta Transit
- Union City Transit
- Vine
- VTA
- WestCAT
- Wheels
Apple does mention that it’ll work with the optional “Express Transit” feature built into Wallet, allowing you to make these relatively small transit transactions without requiring Face ID or Touch ID verification — a nice touch for when there’s 10 people waiting to get on behind you and you’d rather not have to deal with convincing your phone that you are, in fact, you.
So when will it officially roll out? Good question — and one that Apple isn’t answering yet. In an e-mail announcing the coming Clipper support, they say it’s “Coming soon,” but don’t get any more specific than that. A tweet from the @BayAreaClipper account, meanwhile, narrows it down to “this spring” and reiterates that Google Pay support is coming soon, as well.
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