The Miami-Dade Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTPW) has launched a digital loyalty rewards platform to incentivise travel on public transport.

The platform is part of the transit agency’s mobile app, GO Miami-Dade Transit, which includes features such as tracking, trip planning, mobile passes and a rewards program powered by Cubic Interactive. Cubic provides integrated solutions that increase situational understanding for transportation, defence C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and training customers worldwide.

One aspect of the rewards program is that travellers using public transport can engage with advertising content to earn loyalty points that they can redeem for Miami-Dade Transit (MDT) value. Travellers earn ‘Stars’ – a proprietary digital loyalty currency, owned and operated by Cubic – when they view or interact with ads on the transit agency’s mobile app, or when they use a loyalty-based transit service provided by MDT. Collected stars can then be turned into transit value and used to subsidise or pay for transit rides or redeem for various in-app offers.

“We are excited to be the first transit agency to adopt this loyalty-based interactive service that rewards riders,” said Alice N. Bravo P.E., director of transportation and public works for Miami-Dade County. “The program is a great way to incentivise our current riders, invite new ones to give transit a try. It provides the building blocks that will help us increase the use of transit to reduce congestion.”

Cubic Interactive allows transit agencies to build custom loyalty programs that reside within their existing mobile transit apps, or future app innovations, to help shift peak transit patterns, ease the pressure on the transit network and promote smarter and healthier mobility choices. Miami-Dade Transit is the first agency to implement Cubic’s end-to-end solution.

“Cubic Interactive offers unique benefits for not only advertisers, but also transit agencies and travellers all over the world,” said Laurent Eskenazi, interim president of Cubic Transportation Systems. “We are able to not only offer travellers incentives to travel in ways that reduce congestion and streamline commutes, while providing new revenue streams for transit agencies but also advertisers with the opportunity to tap into a highly valuable and captive audience – something that hasn’t been done before in the public transportation space.”