The City of Cape Town is intending to pilot a new payment system on the MyCiTi bus network from July. It will enable payments with a bank card, or digital wallet card.
- The City of Cape Town intends to pilot a new payment system on the MyCiTi from July.
- Anyone with a bank card will be able to use the sytem.
- Rob Quintas, mayoral committee member for urban mobility, expects the change to boost use of the MyCiTi service.
- For more financial news, visit News24 Business.
The City of Cape Town intends to pilot bank card payments on MyCiTi buses from July, opening up the service to anyone with a bank card in their wallet or a digital wallet card on their phone.
Rob Quintas, mayoral committee member for urban mobility, confirmed that the city aims to pilot the modernised MyCiTi payment system by July in an interview with News24.
“We are hoping in July this year to go live with that system, where you can use your bank card to tap in and tap off, not needing a MyCiTi card, which is going to potentially get a lot more bums on seats, so to speak, particularly in the CBD,” said Quintas.
Since launching in 2010, riders on the MyCiTi bus network have needed a MyConnect card to use the network. Riders needed to buy the card, which currently costs R40, and then load credit onto it.
Beyond the upfront cost, the issues with this system are that the MyConnect cards expire, riders often need to stand in queues or print out cash to load more credit, and they might lose credit if they lose their card.
Quintas acknowledged the issues. “The system was great in 2010. It was comparable to what was the norm. But systems do become outdated,” he said.
Frequent MyCiTi riders would have noticed that the hardware on buses and stations has been upgraded in recent months.
Quintas said that the old validators had been in place since 2014 and that new validators were needed to facilitate payments using bank cards.
He said that there had been some stumbling blocks that had delayed the rollout of the new system.
The main issue was explained in a post on X made by Cape Town Mayor Hill-Lewis last year.
Hill-Lewis said that the Department of Transport (DOT) had tried to compel the city to use the banking and payments system developed for the SA National Roads Agency (Sanral) for the e-tolls system.
He said that, in the city’s view, the system would have been substantially more expensive than others in the market and would not have supported the use of cellphones or credit cards.
After a prolonged disagreement, the city convinced the department of its position and was allowed to use a different system, Hill-Lewis said.
Quintas said that the city was able to replace the validators utilising the money it had obtained from the national government through the public transport network grant. He said the city has sufficient funding to cover the software side of the solution.
With these disputes now behind them, the city is aiming to pilot the new system in July.
Quintas said that the new system will align the MyCiTi with the norm now found in Europe.
It is important to note that anyone who would like to continue using a MyConnect card once the pilot rolls out will be able to do so. Quintas said this is important because not everyone has a phone that can make tap payments, and people without bank cards should not be precluded from accessing the service.
The city launched new MyConnect cards, which do not expire, last month.
Quintas said he expects the new system to boost MyCiTi ridership.
The MyCiTi network reached record ridership levels in 2024/25, narrowly surpassing 20 million journeys completed for the first time in its history. However, this is only marginally more than the 19.9 million journeys completed on the network in 2016/17, suggesting that the service has not continued on the sharp growth path it was on after launch in 2010.
