STIB/MIVB Open-Loop Contactless Fare Payment
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Tap a bank card, ride the metro: by mid-2025, 64% of STIB's single tickets were sold contactless. The catch sits in the fare table — a tap sells only the full adult fare, so regulars still carry a MOBIB card.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 2 more in Brussels · 🎫 Smart ticketing guide · 🚲 Mobility projects
Since 1 July 2020, riders on Brussels' metro, trams and buses can pay by tapping a contactless bank card, smartphone or watch on the validator — STIB followed London, Paris and Milan rather than pioneering. A tap debits the €2.40 single fare, transfers within 60 minutes are free, and a daily cap stops the meter at €8.50: after four journeys the rest of the day rides free. Adoption has been steady rather than explosive — 35% of single tickets in 2021, 57% by May 2024, 64% by mid-2025, with 65% of taps from physical bank cards and 35% from phones and watches. The channel sells only the standard adult fare: reduced fares, season tickets and multi-operator products still require a MOBIB card, and each passenger needs their own card or device.
📊 Impact
STIB counted 40 million contactless journeys between the July 2020 launch and mid-2025 — 13 million of them in the final twelve months, four times the first year's volume — and reports rider satisfaction of 8.4/10 for the channel. All figures are the operator's own.
🎓 Lesson
Open-loop payment serves the occasional rider, not the regular: because a tap can only sell the full single fare, two-thirds of one-way tickets moved contactless while pass holders stayed on MOBIB — the payment technology didn't change the fare structure, it exposed it.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “STIB/MIVB Open-Loop Contactless Fare Payment” — Brussels, Belgium. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/brussels-stib-contactless/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.